How to Can Grape Juice Concentrate (To Make Grape Juice!)

well hello while we're getting into fall it's also still the remnants of summer produce that kind of go into fall and that means concord grapes so growing up our farms and a lot of farms in the midwest have these concord grapes on them they're the purple vibrant really flavorful grapes they're not a table grape because they have seeds they have thick skins but what they have is immense amount of flavor so we would always do either grape jams grape butters or grape juice now it's kind of a concentrated juice and that way it doesn't take up so many jars and you can just add water whatever you want when you open it up serve it to your family now i know you're thinking grape juice like maybe you buy that for your kids but really no no homemade grape juice is the most intense grape flavor it is so delicious you can make different drinks with it you can use it just for juice we would always put seven up with it and kind of get a little bit of a great like on sunday nights with popcorn yeah yeah you need to so it's such a simple thing and it's something that if you happen to know where grapes are or if you go to your farmer's market and see concord grapes this is what you can do with them so to start so simple we're gonna take our washed and cleaned grapes so obviously they're picked off the vine then you wash them like three times because they have a lot of dirt and debris on them so you want to keep rubbing your hands through them agitate them in water drain them rinse them repeat but we're just going to put them into a large stock pot they're all these beautiful grapes i remember doing this all the time with grandma because she she could do anything and this was just something that she would do so quickly then we're going to add a little bit of water now this water just to help it start cooking and really what we want to do is soften all the grapes is really just start to break them down so they're going to be easy to juice because that's a little bit of the process so we're going to bring this over the stove we're going to put it over kind of medium high heat let it come to a boil it's going to simmer for a little bit then we're going to be making juice [Music] the grape mixture has cooked and you're gonna see this is really just watery gross grapeiness it smells amazing in the house just like you opened the best grape juice ever but it looks gross and so what do grapes have they have lots of seeds in them their skins are really thick so some of the recipes you'll see they'll put a whole you know bunch of grapes on the stem and they'll can it in the jar and just let it seep into juice then i think you get tasty like stem and it's gross other ones will put it in a bag and hang it overnight i don't think it's worth it either and you still can usually get more sediment from that so what does my family do we take a cotton tea towel just a good cotton tea towel this one has been used for this before so it somewhat still has a discoloration we just seam it on the corners you can buy nut milk bags you could do multiple layers of cheesecloth but this works well just to have a bag this is one of those things i admit it probably seems like barriers to entry with this like oh seriously to make a bag i have to do this you can buy cotton bags you can get these components it's totally worth it if you can get grapes now the other thing is grapes really stain your hands and on a normal day today if you see me in stories i get really gross hands and you're going to see that they get really stained and they stay like that for days and it looks like i was in an awful accident for a video i will put gloves on and this is just for aesthetics you could do with your hands but what we're going to really have to do is strain out all this juice through this bag so it takes a little bit and it can get messy so that's why i look i have an apron on because even though we're doing it through this cotton bag it still will be amazing how it can squirt it can squeeze in places and guess what grape juice just like it is on clothing it can be really stain prone so we obviously want to take precautions i want to make sure that we're somewhat clean stain so what i'm going to do is i'm going to keep filling this bag up and at the end i'll probably just have to pour it in but what we're going to do once we're getting it into there and so i let it cool off a little bit just because it's really hot and your hands just couldn't take it but this is look instantly we're getting some juice in here and so as it collects down in here i'll pour it into this pan because we're going to have to reheat it just slightly but look at that rich beautiful juice we're getting and so then i'm just going to sit here and i'm going to squeeze it out look at that look at that juice coming and we're going to keep all the really thick skins the sediment just the stuff you don't want in a juice and then we're going to get this beautiful concentrated juice so i'm going to sit here i'm going to squeeze i'm going to add the rest that i have in there and then we're going to come back we're going to add a little bit of sugar we're going to add a little bit of water we'll talk about it and we got juice making is fun it's not overwhelming and believe me it's delicious and doesn't have near as much sugar as what you buy like don't even at the end here you don't want to push so hard that you break or tear the bag or that you push out sediment you don't want but you want to get it fairly dry and this is where grandma would always double check if i did it when i did it with her or if i did it with mom which i go over now and squeeze them out for mom but you can kind of tell if we open up this bag look at how dry so all you get is the skins and the seeds and that's what you want you want to you want to retrieve all that juice and it's all just this beautiful if you were in here the smell is just amazing you get this intense beautiful grape aroma now i know it seems like okay fruit juice it should have a lot of inherent sugar apple juice does you know grapes once squeezed like this don't retain as good a flavor in the same sweetness you expect them to so originally this recipe had a ton of sugar in it we've changed that because you really don't need that sugar you just need enough that it gives you some of that sweetness back and remember this is a concentrate so we're putting about a cup and a half into it and this is going to give us then quite a bit of concentrate so we're putting that in and also now again you're going to say wait you're adding water back why i thought it was a concentrate it still is and what this is is kind of think of how old recipes you would want them you know they didn't want to waste tons of jars just to have ready to drink because the family would drink way more than just a quart of juice so you want to have enough in there that you can add either some water or whatever liquid you want to that it extends it makes it more of a drinkable juice so you don't have to have so much stored up on your shelves so we're going to take this concentrate we're going to bring it back to a boil and just to make sure all those sugar dissolves the water goes into it all mixes together and you want everything to be hot when you can it so with my water bath going hot i just touched it my jars are sterilized ready to go my lids my rings we're gonna be in business here in no time and i've kept it somewhat clean we still need to wipe up a little bit after it came to a boil i just let it cook for a little bit make sure all the sugar was dissolved it was mixed together and now i'm just ladling it into jars this is super easy and yes it takes a few little steps but look at this gorgeous deep burgundy colored juice you were getting and it's super just like flavorful like this is nothing i don't know to me when you do home canning there's no comparison you can't sit and say a button is better i mean i get it it's more convenient what has convenient taught us i feel like nothing so we have it all in jars and then what we need to do is what i always do we take some hot water and i just wipe off with a clean little paper towel the rims to make sure there's no drips on it any sugar residue you already should check to make sure there's no chips or cracks in them and then once that's all done i see all my little drips here and guys you want to keep it clean as you're going because depending on your counters i know like quartz it's not supposed to but i don't trust it i don't want stains so then we take our lids and our rings and we just start putting them on so i have them ready to go and this is what i love about canning once you get into the groove of it you've done a few things this is all kind of like what you've done before you know the lid and ring part getting them ready for a water bath it all becomes second nature after you do it a few times now when we were talking about canning back in the day canyon you of course have to have either a rack in a canner so like if you buy one that is a canning kit it will come with a rack because you need to keep them off the bottom but back in the day before they had everyone making everything for them they had these these holders so these are old family ones you'd put a jar in them kind of like this this is an old type of jar and look at the beauty i think things like this are just beautiful but this is what they used to do and then they would set all these individuals into a canner into a hot water bath even had old jar lifters that they could sit and try to i don't trust them now but they probably still work they had all these things and they had to make do and look if they were able to do it with less than what we have then you can do it too so i'm gonna take my jar lifter and this is why i do it on racks like this because i can pick them all up they're hot i'm just gonna take them over here to my water bath that's ready to go it's boiling it's hot and we're going to start putting them in and you want to make sure the water covers them like i always say you know maybe by like an inch just to me as long as it covers you're good to go it's a pretty quick processing time you always want to check the usda site you know just in case your altitude will make a difference i always have a little bit of hot water just in case i need more but those are covered we're gonna let them come to a boil process and pull them out then you're gonna have juice during the winter what can be better [Music] once they're processed you just i take them out i kind of tip them as i take them out just to get the excess water off the top but that's all the grape juice concentrate is and i know it seems like okay but you can go buy it yet you can but you can make it yourself so why wouldn't you it's just fun but it's also more delicious it does have less sugar i promise you and how fun is it to tell everyone that you made this grape juice concentrate you could pull it out for your kids you could pull it out for yourself you can make mixed drinks with it if you want to but otherwise what you can do i always think about two-thirds maybe to half of the grape juice to a third to half of water now it's up to you two wonderful things happened in that moment a jar sealed and i tasted how good this is just intense grape flavor i think there's just something special about using what's in season maybe what's found locally obviously i don't expect everyone to have grapes in their backyard but i bet your farmer's market will i bet your favorite market that you go to just might this time of year when they're in season and then you can make grape juice concentrate it's super easy it's so good i think once you have it can you imagine giving this as a gift who would not feel so special so i hope you make this i hope you enjoy it i hope you share it around because when you share it yes of course it helps me so much but it helps everyone see this is so doable if i can do this you can do it we're making four jars pretty carefree pretty simple we're doing it together and it's fun so try it out enjoy it check my website wiseguide.com for this recipe and all my other recipes they're all on my site and until next time i have another batch of grape juice to do so i'm gonna take my juice drink it and make [Music] you

Channel: Wyse Guide

Views: 57,182

Keywords: food, recipes

Id: uzfL-k0ox14

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021