Can't anywhere find means of preventing freshly pressed juice turning from lovely green, orange or pink to dirty brown in half an hour.
There are sugggestions that an acidulator or boiling helps??
Add a campden tablet - used for brewing and designed to do just that Tim! Its a Sulphur based compound (potassium or sodium metabisulfite)....
From a wine making forum
Many fresh fruits and juices turn brown when the fruit is cut or damaged, in the same way that an apple discolors when it is cut in half. This browning spoils the taste of the wine, but it can be prevented by dissolving one Campden tablet in each gallon of juice or must, or by dropping the crushed fruit into sulphited water, i.e. water containing one dissolved Campden tablet per gallon (or 4.5 litres). This will also help to destroy bacteria and wild yeasts.
For cut apples lemon juice does the trick. Have you tried a small quirt of lemon?
Campden tablet? Yes - for wine making, but for fresh drinking?
No 'off' flavours?
Yes - lemon juice helps stop browning short term, but I find that it doesn't seem to help in juice. And makes it needing sugar. And how much to eg a pint?
Tim - I haven't done it so I couldn't say for sure but I believe that the sulphur is converted by the acid present into sulphur dioxide leaving a little sodium behind which shouldn't affect the taste but I leave it for any chemists here to correct me..
The sulphur dioxide will also dissipate from the juice...
Ah!
Try mixing it with another fruit that contains acid - even better if it's strongly coloured - to hide any tiny bit of brown.
If you've made blackcurrant cordial without much sugar then now is the time to mix it in - it works brilliantly with apple. It's worth just freezing next years' blackcurrant juice without sugar in anticipation of the apple harvest.
Juice from my grapes is always sharper than the grapes themselves (even in London) so that usually does the trick too.
Next year try stocking the freezer with unsweetened blackberry juice too.
Actually, unsweetened blackcurrant is even better with pear juice.
Cheers.
it must depend on the apple as well as mine stay with their lovely colour - however a thought occurred to me - it was suggested to me to freeze all apples that were going to be used for juicing and we have so many apples I am glad to do this so we can juice when we want to - you thaw them out for a while in the sink in water and then juice them (we have a small press) so I am wondering if that helps them keep their colour :-\
Blackcurrants? Ah, we have some in the freezer. But that, surely, just disguises the brown - & it's 'off' flavour?
Assuming that the brown does give an 'off' flavour?
Tim
Alternatively you can let them ferment in the bottle (use a sparkling water bottle in the fridge) and have sparkling apple juice, albeit cloudy but likely to be sweet. If you leave it too long it will go cider dry but is is a fascinating tasting experiment!
OC
Can't wait for a ferment - need it now!
Back to the blackcurrant thing - it's the lovely apple colour that I want to keep.
I've not tried this with juice, but it might be worth experimenting:
One of my apple trees, an old unidentified variety, tends to brown very quickly when peeled. I've found the best thing to stop this is a pinch of vitamin C powder (which I buy for breadmaking, Dove's farm) in the rinsing water; it works better than lemon juice and is easier. Maybe you could add a little to the juice? It is quite sharp but you don't need much.
Or possibly citric acid would do the same?
My other thought is that, if you only need a tiny amount of sugar to balance the flavour after adding acid, that isn't the end of the world? You've still basically got your lovely home-produced juice, far fresher and better than any from the shops.
Good luck with your experimentation, hope you sort it out.
PS: Another thought which you could look into, I wonder if a steam juice extractor would solve the problem without any additives?
PPS: And answering your question on boiling, I bet that would be worth a go - or extracting juice from cooked fruit the old-fashioned way with a jelly bag - as stewed apples don't brown even without sugar.
I wonder if a steam juice extractor would solve the problem without any additives?
I've got one of those and unfortunately it don't work with apples...any berries yes, but apples turn into mush/sauce as the stem cooks them and hardly any juice is extracted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhX39Iw2m5w
I put this up from a recent prog - shows how Patassium metabisulphate (campden tablets) work...
Our apple juice turns a lovely golden brown colour fairly quickly after making, but even the following day there are no 'off' flavours to it. We use a mixture of cooking (Bramley, Catshead or Rev Wilkes) and whichever eating apple is ready to use. So at the moment it is Crown Gold.
Quote from: tim on November 16, 2010, 10:02:33
Blackcurrants? Ah, we have some in the freezer. But that, surely, just disguises the brown - & it's 'off' flavour?
Assuming that the brown does give an 'off' flavour?
When plum puree goes brown there is a definite flavour change - not exactly 'off' - more like the difference between wine and sherry - though I still don't like it.
Blackcurrant juice stops this happening in the same way that lemon juice does. Plums go so quickly that it's only possible to stop 90% of it - so yes the colour is useful.
With apples, as Palustris says, the brown is less taste change, much less of a problem - it's also slower - but blackcurrants will still stop it.
I find sulphites of any kind quite unpleasant, citric acid is better, ascorbic acid (vitC) better still, but they all change the flavour of your apples - if you are going to do this then you might as well make something really delicious and uniquely flavoured by using your favourite sharp fruit.
My parents started making apple juice 10+ years ago, and had the same problem.
A crushed campden tablet was the solution. There was no discernible taste in the juice.
If you prefer your juice clear, then store in a 2 litre PET bottle overnight in the fridge and the sediment will sink to the bottom. you can then decant into a clean bottle or just poor from the bottle without disturbing the sediment.
The other option is to just shake the bottle and have cloudy apple juice.
Apple juice also freezes well if you have too much to drink in one go. Bottle in old PET (fizzy drinks) bottles or plastic milk bottles 9remembering to leave a gap for the liquid to expand into, and store upright in a freezer.
ARV
thank you so much for asking this question Flighty, i have been watching with interest and have just tried making some juice and added some campden powder- our local wine shop sells powder now not tablets. The resulting apple juice is a nice green colour and tastes nice. I actually think that the taste is not as nice when the juice turns brown- there obviously is a need for a random double blind quality controlled experiment here! Do we taste with our eyes as well as our taste buds! Anyway our morning apple juice will be much nicer now thanks to you and the other forumers!
anne x
Sulphites are so common these days that many people don't notice them - my wife actually prefers the horrible bright yellow dried apricots from the supermarket to the lovely warm fruity unsulphited brown ones you get from traditional sources.
I can't taste tiny amounts of sulphites used to stop rots in wine (some can) but the quantities used to change the colour of oxidising fruit are a lot more noticeable.
If you have to have a quick fix then it's certainly much better to use VitC if you can afford it.
Cheers.
Agree with you there Vinlander, we can buy unsulphited and organic apricots from a wholefood warehouse in sheffield and they are much nicer.
will try the vit c on the next batch of aple juice as also prefer natural to chemicals. however i have been reassured by the information given by the other forumers as to what happens when you use the campden method.
anne x
Quote from: pumpkinlover on November 18, 2010, 08:07:21
will try the vit c on the next batch of aple juice as also prefer natural to chemicals.
Although I agree much of the Vit C we buy these days is synthesised as opposed to extracted...
This describes a one step synthesis...
A method is provided for producing L-ascorbic acid (Vitamin-C) in a single process step. Starting material, particularly a mixture of compounds from the group consisting of glucose, sorbitol, sorbose, and 2-keto-L-gulonic acid, is catalytically oxidized in aqueous solution by hypochlorous acid. L-ascorbic acid then can be separated from the aqueous solution, and the unconverted reactants recycled for greater conversion. The reaction occurs in the aqueous state at ambient temperature near a pH of 5.5 when an optimum amount of hydrous cobalt-oxide is present in the solution.
May be I'll try lemon juice instead !! ;)
Quote from: BarriedaleNick on November 18, 2010, 08:28:55
Although I agree much of the Vit C we buy these days is synthesised as opposed to extracted...
If you don't like the idea of one kind of simple food molecules being turned into another simple food molecule by heat and bleaching (by simple predictable reagents used for centuries) and low toxicity, low mobility catalysts (that by definition aren't present in the end product) then you should be 100x more worried by what they put in every kind of processed food - even dried fruit. Not to mention complex and unpredictable pesticides, herbicides, fungicides.
I do worry about the complex synthetic stuff in our foods - that's why I grow my own and minimise the rest.
Home grown VitC in home-grown blackcurrant juice works just as well and the end result tastes better than the sum of its parts.
But to really worry about such simple stuff as VitC synthesis going wrong - that way lies the padded cell.
You need to apply the venerable and common-sense 'peanut test' - anything that's less deadly than choking on a peanut isn't worth bothering about. It covers 90% of what the newspapers would like to spook us with (including rail travel) and 99% of what alternative therapists warn us to avoid.
In fact it covers just about everything except what makes really big bucks for unscrupulous businesses.
The replies to this all make such interesting reading. I guess we are all looking at the things that concern us from slightly different points on a continuum.
We try to avoid processed foods as much as we can and it really is not difficult because after so many years you just do not like that type of food.
One of the main problems we have is monosodium glutamate and I know that in itself can cause a huge range of opinions, but from a personal point of view the less you have the lower your tolerance becomes. As we have cut it out of our diet we now have about zero tolerance, unless we accidentally have any-usually in gravy when we go out.
Quote from: Vinlander on November 19, 2010, 01:05:58
But to really worry about such simple stuff as VitC synthesis going wrong - that way lies the padded cell.
Im not in the least worried about it nor am I worried about adding a bit of Potassium Metabisulphite to my wine/juice/fruit which does seem to bother some people!
Just pointing out that the distinction between natural and synthetic is not as clear cut as it would sometimes appear. Sulphur dioxide is after all a perfectly natural chemical as well..
I like to go as natural as possible from sheer prudence - but when the 'green/enviro' approach moves away from 'best efforts' towards a 'belief/faith culture' then I get very very worried... It isn't a holy war.
For me common sense trumps dogma every time.
I use metabisulphite myself for sterilisation - it is a simple substance with centuries of safe usage and there are very few question marks hanging over it when it is used in sensible amounts.
I'm also happy with chemical synthesis when the technique is tried and tested and the substances involved are simple enough to be predictable - there is nothing magic about chemical structures.
It is an insult to the origins of the organic movement to suggest that magic (or imaginary purity/moral issues) comes into growing food - when it got going it was based on doubt - which made it much more scientific than the blindly overconfident mainstream agriculture coming from the technical colleges.
Sadly the movement has been infiltrated by a 'happy clappy' element that obviously hasn't found what it wants elsewhere... a pity as they obviously need a friendly, controlled and sheltered environment (I don't mean an asylum - I mean the Anglican Church!).
Anyway that means that for making apple juice taste fresh there is no contest:
First: Home-grown sharp/tart fruit juice.
Second: Lemons from the shop (beware the skin/zest of waxed fruit - very powerful and persistent pesticides are commonplace).
Third: VitC (ascorbic acid) powder (from a reputable source).
Acceptable but worth keeping for emergencies only: Sulphites.
An apple a keeps a doctor away, so it means an apple was very beneficial for us. Apple juice contain a great vitamins in it and also having a good flavor. It contain vitamin A and C in good manner. It reduce a cholesterol level if it high and maintain it.
Tim - did you manage to sort out your apple juice?