Aronia berries are the new local superfood: With their high content of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals, aronia berries are the perfect health fruit. If you juice the berries yourself, you can also benefit from their positive effects outside of the harvest season.
Aronia juice is a true vitamin injection
Juice the aronia berries cold
The key advantage of cold juicing is that no nutrients are lost in the process. However, the raw juice can only be kept for a few days. If you want to store the aronia berry juice obtained in this way, you have to boil it, which means that there is no longer any difference to the juice of the hot juiced aronia berries. You can cold juice your berries with two different devices:
Juicer with centrifuge
Most commercially available juicers extract the juice from fruit or vegetables using centrifugal force. The aronia berries are crushed in the device and then spun in the centrifuge, which separates the juice from the solid parts of the berries. Centrifugal juicers work very quickly and carefully, but are sometimes quite noisy.
juicer
With juice presses, the fruit or vegetables to be juiced are finely ground. The aronia berries are thus slowly pressed through so-called juicing screws, which releases their juice. This variant of juicing is the gentlest and thus produces the healthiest juice. For soft fruits such as aronia berries, using a juicer is very suitable.
Juice the aronia berries hot
An alternative to cold juicing is hot juicing, which gives you heated juice that you can store for several months (provided you put it in sterile bottles and sealed them immediately). Again, you have two options:
steam juicer
The simpler option is to use a steam juicer. This consists of several elements placed one on top of the other, resembling a large cooking pot with a spout hose. Fill the bottom pot with a little water, put the aronia berries in the strainer above and be patient. The water vapor destroys the cell structure of the berries, causing the juice to escape and flow through the hose into the bottle provided.
The method is simple and particularly well suited for berries. Steam juicers are also significantly cheaper than juicers or centrifugal juicers.
cooking pot
If you rarely juice and don't want to buy your own device, you can also juice your aronia berries in a saucepan. Put the washed berries in a sufficiently large saucepan, add some water and cook for about 20 minutes. Then press the soft-boiled aronia berries through a sieve. To get a particularly clear juice, you should filter it through a cloth in a second pass.
If you want to store the juice for a long time, boil it again before bottling and use sterile bottles.
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