The season is over and now time to clean up. We have heaps of apples this year and only geese and chickens to eat the throwaways. Fortunately my wine maker friend Geoff Wells loaned me his press and dicing machine. In the past I have offered him some of my waste apples but he said he had enough and why don’t you try making some for your self. It seemed like a good idea so on a very wet day ( yes it is starting to rain again) we decided to process some of our apples and pears.
Both the apples and the pears have to be diced in order for the press to extract the juice. Some of the apples are quite firm and also need cutting up before dropping in the dicing machine. It pays to be very careful with this machine as you could do yourself serious harm if you got your fingers near the blades.
Having diced until you are sick of it it is then necessary to charge the press. I found you didn’t need a cloth liner and in fact this slowed things down. It is very important to add on the spacers to the filled press so that the maximum amount of pressing can be done in one go.
The apples were much harder to extract the juice than the pears. And the yield wasn’t great. I am sure we could do more to improve that but as we had plenty of apples didn’t worry about it this time.

[scrollGallery id=31]