When the bushes in the forest and in your own garden are full of blackberries in late summer, you often cannot process your entire harvest freshly. It's worth processing some of the berries into fruity-sweet blackberry juice.

Blackberries are easy to juice

Which blackberries are suitable for juicing?

Not only the special blackberry breeds that grow in your garden are suitable for juicing: the much smaller but often particularly aromatic blackberries that grow in forests, on roadsides and railway embankments are also wonderful sources of juice.
In any case, the blackberries must be fully ripe but not brown or even moldy. When washing the blackberries, check them thoroughly to make sure they are free of quirks and discard any berries that are unsuitable for juicing.

Five ways to juice blackberries

  • Blackberry juice from the (centrifugal) juicer: With this method, the blackberries are crushed and spun in the device, which separates the juice from the solid fruit components. A fast and efficient method with a mostly high-priced device.
  • Blackberry juice from the juicer: During the pressing process, the fruit is ground finer and finer in the electric juicer, causing the juice to escape. A particularly gentle method that requires a little more time.
  • Blackberry juice from the berry press: A berry press is similar to a meat grinder. The blackberries are filled into a funnel (€5.00) and squeezed out by manual cranking. Also very gentle; requires manual work.
  • Blackberry juice from the steam extractor: The steam extractor filled with the blackberries and some water is placed on the stove. The resulting steam causes the juice to escape from the berries and flows through a hose into bottles provided. A simple method with the advantage that the juice heated by the steam can be stored in sterile bottles without any further work steps.
  • Blackberry juice from the saucepan: You can strain blackberries that have been boiled with a little water through a sieve or, even better, a cloth. A variant that is a bit more work-intensive, but does not require the purchase of a special device.

Preserve fresh blackberry juice

If you don't want to enjoy the fresh blackberry juice right away, you can preserve it by heating it. You can choose between the simple method of hot filling and the right way to preserve.
When filling hot, the blackberry juice heated to 80 °C is filled into sterile bottles and these are sealed immediately. This juice does not keep quite as reliably for several months as the boiled blackberry juice.
To preserve, place the finished juice in sealed bottles in the water-filled drip tray of your oven. Heat it up to 175 °C and turn off the oven as soon as bubbles appear in the jars. The bottles remain in the closed oven for 30 minutes. You can keep the blackberry juice preserved in this way for at least a year without hesitation.

The garden journal freshness ABC

How can fruit and vegetables be stored correctly so that they stay fresh for as long as possible?

The garden journal freshness ABC as a poster:

  • as a free PDF file to print out yourself

Category:

Vegetable garden