Pressing the Apples

I got just over a gallon and a quart from pressing about 48 small to medium sized Golden Delicious apples.

The beautiful "seconds".

I chopped them before adding them to my food processor.

They needed a little encouragement to continue moving around enough to come in contact with the blades at first. I was able to do 8 at a time. I found this handy plastic child's chopstick set in my drawer. (I checked first to make sure it wasn't long enough to reach the blades.)

Here is what the apples looked like after chopping. I let the processor run until everything was moving smoothly and I couldn't see any large chunks of apple left.

I have a little stand and some jelly bags from my canning supplies so I let the pulp hang for a while. At this point I think it hung there for three hours or so while I was in the garage having fun trying to build the frame for my press. About 4 cups of juice drained out during that time. I have since learned that this leaves the pomace out exposed to the air too long and isn't good. Also, my son came along and decided to "help" the juice out by squeezing the bag with his sweet little 8 year old hands.

The picture below shows my awesome press in action. Well, it doesn't have all the proper parts yet. I used what I had in my kitchen to get me by until I finish it. One thing I did pick up was some Corian countertop pieces. I stopped by a local fabricator and asked if they had any scrap pieces. I ended up buying 5 sink cutouts for $15. I plan on grooving them. The Corian guy told me if I needed to cut them I should do it with a carbide tipped blade.

Above you will see the scissor jack partly covered with tinfoil (I thought it would help keep chunks of grease or whatever falling into the cider). The thing inside the plastic bag is a piece of firewood to bring the pressing power down to contact the Corian sink cutout. (I cut the ends of the firewood to square it as best I could.) In between the two pieces of Corian is the apple pulp which is inside the jelly bag pictured previously.

I think this worked well enough to keep up with the amount of pulp my food processor can put out. After pureeing three sets of 8 apples each (I did let it rest a little in between) it was feeling fairly hot.  I did the second batch of three sets of 8 apples each the next day. If I do end up with more apples I will definitely need to build an apple grinder :)