Wild grapes

[Spike188]

Picked, and cut clusters of wild grapes in our back yard this afternoon.

An 1-1/2 hours of steaming

yielded over 12 cups of juice.

Because this was a last minute idea, there a no canning jar lids in the house. Canning in pint jars will have to happen tomorrow.

[DavidBarkey]

Why do you steam them ? We have done our own grapes into juice before but never steamed them first just put them through the juicer and canned or made into jelly and canned . What does the steaming do ?

[Spike188]

The juice steamer consist of 3 parts.

The water pot for generating the steam.

The juice collector which stacks on top of the water pot.

Topped by the fruit bucket which is perforated with a lot of small holes.

Water level in the pot was almost full at start of the cook. The fruit basket was filled to thr point of the lid just closing. After 30 minutes of steaming, the remainder of the grape clusters were added. When about 2 cups of juice was collected, it was poured over the grapes. The juice, being near boiling, helps promote skin breakdown and speeds the steaming prosses.

After steaming for around 2 hours this was what was left of the stems, seeds, and pulp.

This is the first using a steamer vs using a water bath method. We found the juice to have a less woody flavor.

One word of advice is set a chair or stool in front of the stove for supporting a drip pan and jars. The drain hose and juice are scalding hot. Dropping the hose due tp heat, while filling a jar, makes a huge mess on the floor.

[Spike188]

@DavidBarkey We used the water bath method up to now. Because wild grapes are so small and ripeness varies from dried out to green plus not taking time to pull the berries off of the stems, there would be a hint of woody flavor. A friend offered to let us use her steamer so this was the first experience with it. It is surprising how fast the grapes steamed down. The did require and occasional stir and after the heat was turned off, the unit was left on the stove over night so that all off the juice had time to drain off.

A Youtuber talked about saving apple peelings and cores for steaming the juice off of. I might try that next summer.