Gwape Juice!!

There were gween gwapes and yeyyow gwapes and wed gwapes and purpole gwapes and…

(if you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about – go HERE to see the Kid History video. I promise it’s worth your time…it’s hilarious)

*ahem* Anyway. This week my mom and I learned how to can grape juice. And it. was. so. awesome.

And since we’re totally going to do this next year (right, Mom?) I’m going to write out how to do it…mostly so we remember for next time, because we’re both probably going to forget next time we go grape picking.

The Relief Society President in my Mom’s ward always sends out emails when different fruits are ready to pick and last week she got one about grapes! My family was in Tennessee at the time and so we planned on going together this week to give it a shot.

So on Tuesday we went way out to the boonies to the vineyard/orchard/farm place to get our grapes. Our goal was to pick 100lbs. Why 100lbs? Well, if you picked 100lbs or more, it was $0.50/lb!!!!!!!!! Awesome deal, right?! That was another reason we wanted to give this a try (because you know me and a good deal) Because we were picking so much, we knew we wanted to juice them. I loooooove grape juice. Picking the grapes was so fun!
(Don’t let this picture fool you: this one spent most of the time flapping her arms around squealing about bees and spiders – she was a good sport though and could spot the biggest clusters of grapes ;)
I think I was the only one who genuinely enjoyed the grape picking part… ;)
We had these big 5 gallon buckets that we put the grapes in. We filled 5 to get a grand total of 103lbs!

We took them home and washed them up so that they were ready for juicing. (I may or may not have stroked them and in sweet tones told them we were going to be sucking the life out of them…)

So just in case you randomly decide you want to juice grapes or apples or whatever, I’m going to tell you now you need one of these: a steamer juicer

It’s kind of like a triple boiler. The bottom holds the boiling water and steams the grapes that are put in the top. The juice drips down to the center compartment and comes out that little tube that you can put right into your jar. The problem was that we didn’t know we needed one of these until Monday. (but apparently my Dad did – what?!) And we were picking grapes Tuesday. And I had to go back home Tuesday night. And it turns out you can only get them online. Oops. So Monday afternoon my mom orders one on Amazon and ships it so it would come Tuesday. (super cool to have 1 day shipping!) But then the UPS guy didn’t come until 5:30 Tuesday afternoon (boo!) so we only had a couple of hours to work on it before I had to leave. But it was so fun once we got going!

We washed our jars and then put them into a 200degree oven until we needed them. We also prepped and sanitized the bands and lids.

We filled the bottom of our juicer with water and the top with grapes and waited for the juice to come out the tube. And when it did…I was so excited!!!!
Look! Look!! Juice!!!!!
Once we had enough collected in the middle compartment, it flowed easily into our waiting jar.

We had to work out a few kinks along the way – we learned from my Grandma Hunt (resident grape juicing expert) that it takes about 45 minutes to get all the juices out (we took that first batch out way too soon) and that we shouldn’t put new grapes on top of the old grapes in that top section. (oops – but we only did that once)

By the time I had to leave, we had almost 8 jars of juice ready to go and I could take some home! My mom continued juicing that night and the next day until the afternoon. That’s a lot of juicing! We got almost 40 quarts from our 100lbs of grapes! SO AWESOME! Next up: Apples this fall! YAY!

I made some up for drinking this morning by adding my 1 quart of grape juice with 1 quart of water and 1/3cup sugar.

Ahh…the sweet fruits of our labors ;)