Nina's Blog - Thursday 23rd October 2025

@being Here are the apples filling the bottom three drawers of my freezer.

And here's one of them

@ninalanyon oh wow that's a lot of apples! :) the single one, looks in very good condition, so they can be eaten as well?

@being Oh yes, they are perfectly edible. They are very sweet with firm juicy flesh and a pleasant sweet scent.

I suppose one bucket of apples might be about five kilos and I've collected about six buckets full so far so that's roughly 30 kg of apples. A proper industrial cider press would turn 30 kg of apples into at least 25 kg of juice but my juicer is much less effective and I would only get about 15. So I need to collect another four bucket fulls to get 25 litres of juice to fill one fermenting bin. That should be easy, I'm pretty sure that there must still be at least double what I've already collected still on the grass under the trees.

@ninalanyon you could possibly sell some and buy a better juicer...? I have no idea!

@being I don't think there are any juicers for home use that do any better.

A press would work better but you need something that can exert a force of something like 500 kN/m2. That's like a 50 ton weight. I tried building a press once using a jack from a car. I made a square wooden box with an internal area of about 200 mm x 200 mm that's 0.04 m2 or 1/25 m2. I put it in a frame made of 100 mm x 100 mm wooden beams. Filled the box with apples, put a wooden plate on top and then the jack between that and the frame. The jack was capable of lifting at least 1 000 kg so it was able to exert a pressure of 25 tonne-force per square metre and it just dented the apples. I think it would have worked if I had reduced the area to 100 mm x 100 mm. Then I would have had 100 tonn-force per square metre. But I'd have to press the apples almost one by one! Much too time consuming!

Anyway I don't think I'd make enough money selling apple juice here. The English phrase that comes to mind is "Like carrying coals to Newcastle". This area is one of the principal apple growing districts with lots of orchards and lots of people have apple trees in their gardens too. Most people just sweep them up and throw them away.

@ninalanyon okay fair enough..

oh noooo I love apples don't throw them away!

@ninalanyon https://cavellorchards.co.uk/traditional-norfolk-and-heritage-apples-honey-and-home-made-produce/recipes/apple-marmalade/

It's very tasty if you want to use up some apples.

@22Michelle Thank you.

It's interesting to compare British jam recipes with Norwegian recipes for syltetøy. Both Google and Wiktionary treat them as exact translations but if you search the Norwegian part of the web for recipes for syltetøy you find that the weight of added sugar can be as low as 10% to 13% of the fruit weight. In such recipes the fruit is boiled but it is not set because no pectin is added. A typical recipe of that kind for jordbær (strawberry) syltetøy, is a litre of strawberries (about 800 g) plus 1 dl granulated sugar (about 85 g). Boil the fruit in very little water for 8 to 10 minutes, add the sugar, stir while boiling until the sugar is dissolved, pour into hot sterile jars.

There are also recipes that are very similar to British jam with roughly equal weights of sugar and fruit as well as pectin and every variation in between. But even the industrially made stuff is generally much runnier and tastes much more of the fruit than the British industrial equivalent which to me always seems to have had the flavour boiled out of it.

Still I shall buy some lemons and sugar on Monday and give the apple marmalade a go as I've got plenty of apples. One question though, the recipe doesn't mention removing the pips from the lemons; does this mean they are left in or that they assume that there are none, or ..?

@ninalanyon I removed the pips as I do with the usual Marmalade recipes.

@ninalanyon I take it you did chop the apples into rough slices first? That would greatly reduce the force necessary.

@ArishMell Honestly I can't remember what the recipe called for.

@ArishMell It was a long time ago and I think I tried both ways. Neither produced a usable effect. I think that what would work is what farmers used to use before hydraulic presses were commonplace and that is a cider mill. But while it doesn't need the same high forces it is still well beyond my craft skills and even further beyond my enthusiasm not to mention that I have no idea where I would obtain the wheel. Or where to store something the size of a small farm wagon

A cider mill is a stone wheel that runs in a circular track. On a farm it would have been pulled around by a horse or a donkey. There is a description in one of Thomas Hardy's books I think. The farms generally didn't own a cider mill they just hired it and the owner at harvest time.

In the past before I received the juice extractor I did use a small grape press but it was a messy and tedious business because the press is only about 250 mm tall and about 120 mm diameter. It was about as effective as the juice extractor but much harder work and much more time consuming. The one advantage is that it produces marvellously clear juice entirely free of pulp so if what you want is just a drink of apple juice it produced a much more visually attractive result.