Cicely and I made some tasty apple juice. (She also made some apple cake, which she writes about in her new blog.)

We (Cicely mainly) picked 22kg of apples and borrowed an apple juicer:

We chopped the apples roughly using a knife and then used the food processor to chop them into rough chunks. The press was hard work but we got our first drop of juice!

The juice comes out brown; I'm unsure if this is because we didn't peel the apples or if it just oxidises instantly.

Our neighbour happened to come round while we were juicing and we were able to feed him a glass of juice straight from the press. It can't get much fresher than that.

There seem to be different opinions on pasteurising. We bought some 500ml bottles from Ikea - this size could fit inside a large pan - and sterilised them by boiling them.

The juice was bottled and heated to (in theory) 70 degrees C for 25 minutes. It was hard to get the temperature even so we erred on the side of being a bit hotter. The bottles were then sealed and placed on their side to heat the stopper. The trick, apparently, is to get the juice hot enough to pasteurise it but not too hot to stew it and change the flavour.

The juice turned out surprisingly well. We'd expected that perhaps we'd go to a lot of effort for something undrinkable, but luck was favouring us that day. The apples tasted quite crisp, but juicing seemed to smooth the taste a bit. Pasteurising did change the flavour a bit, but not in a bad way - the juice tasted "smoother" and a bit pear-like.

Aside from the glasses we drunk on the way we got about 4.8 litres of juice from the 22kg of apples. This is a bit less than the internet lead us to believe; I don't know if we didn't press enough, or perhaps the apples were just less juicy.

Getting more out can be a learning for the next time. Perhaps pear juice or cider next…