I Bought Every Single One! Making Homemade Cranberry Juice

[Music] this is the time of year when the grocery stores start getting rid of and clearancing out all of the overstock that they have ordered for the holiday season and this is the time of year that I start stocking the grocery store for frozen fresh cranberries this year I hit the jackpot and they had several bags left and they work on spirits for 50 cents a bag I can not even pass up I feel that good and I bought everything that they still have in the grocery store I think it ended up being like 15 bags of cranberries and I'm going to share with you why I love to buy the cranberries the fresh frozen cranberries at the end of the year so obviously the first reason is because it is so dirt cheap and I love a deal but the other reason is because I don't buy juice in the grocery store we don't do juice a lot in our house I don't like the added expense I don't like to deal with the garbage when you buy it from the store and I don't like that I don't have the control over the amount of sugar that's in juice but when you buy fresh frozen cranberries you can actually turn it into cranberry juice concentrate that you can then can and have on hand on the homestead and as you need it you can use it an add whatever amount of sugar that you want to so today I'm going to be doing just that I'm going to be turning all of these cranberries into cranberry juice concentrate and then I'm going to cam it in a water bath canner so that I can have it on the homestead for a year or more depending on how quickly we drink it up does it sound complicated to make your own cranberry juice concentrate you're gonna be pretty surprised at really how easy it is and I love bringing topics to you guys that I know might seem overwhelming at first but then breaking it down for you just to show you how very easy it is it's been a whole year since I've done this and we are out of it in our pantry so let's get started so the very first thing we're going to do is we're going to open up all these bags of cranberries and pour them into a big pot I hope my pot is big enough for all these cranberries otherwise I'll just have to do them in that to separate back cranberries are just a beautiful color and this juice concentrate is going to be equally as orgeous I was able to fit 11 bags so the cranberries in this one pot that's five dollars and fifty cents that I have invested in this juice that I'm making let's see how much that creates for the homestead see how far we'll get for us for the year the next step is equally as easy we just need to fill this pot up with water just until it gets to the level of the top of the cranberries we just need to heat these on high it's gonna take quite a bit because they are frozen we need to keep this up until the cranberries start to burst open and once they get to that part I'll make sure to show you what that looks like when I first put them on the stove they had frozen into this giant ice block now all of that ice has melted it's not boiling in there yet but you can see that some of the juice is actually starting to come out of some of the cranberries and mixed with the water that's what we want those cranberries aren't super juicy inside like you would think of a grape all of that flavor is trapped inside their flesh which is really kind of I guess on the dry side so the water is going to kind of infiltrate all of that flesh inside of there and draw out all of those good vitamins and all that wonderful flavor once the liquid gets hot enough the cranberries themselves will actually start to like burst open and sometimes you can see it sometimes you can hear it it's it's pretty interesting but once all of those have burst open and allowed to mix with that water it'll turn into a really wonderful flavorful cranberry juice concentrate smells so good I can hear some of the cranberry starting to burst I hope I can get some good footage for you to show you what it looks like so this one has split open in half so that's what you're listening for and looking for you're looking for these to be popping so they end up getting kind of mashed up kind of like that you see the inside they're mushy so you want then to be mixing in with all of this water mmm tastes good already I mean it is sour don't get me wrong this is gonna be wonderful so in the end what we're looking for here is for all the cranberries to be popped all of them to be mushy and all of them to be combining with all of that water we have a ways to go so it looks like about 99% of the cranberries have popped and everything is boiling so I'm gonna turn off the heat and it's now time for us to strain the liquid away from all of the pulp so the next step is to strain all of this pulp I'm just gonna use a sieve pot and I'm gonna strain it through a cotton towel that I have moistened with water so it's just damp I actually have one of these cotton towels like a tea towel that I save because it's completely stained from other things like this that I do and I just keep one or two of these around and just keep reusing them on things that are gonna stain this is definitely gonna stain so I just put the tea towel or the cotton towel or whatever over it and I'm just gonna start ladling all of this concoction mushy liquidy concoction through this towel it is a pretty thick substance so it's probably gonna take a while for it all to drain through I might have to do this in batches because I don't have a giant strainer and I don't have another big pot like this one at the moment so I ended up tying up this towel and hanging it from the cover I'm hoping that this doesn't end up being a huge mistake and half my cupboard ends up pink but we'll see how it goes it was such a large volume and I was just really having a hard time getting it to go through the towel through the strainer into the pot because the strainer ultimately it's a it goes like too far down into my pot and so I'm thinking maybe I can do the same thing with the rest of what's in my pot in a second location so we'll see hopefully when Kevin comes in he doesn't freak out and ask what I'm doing hopefully he trusts me on this so I figured out how to do it on this other cupboard - and not only that but Kevin did come in and saw these contraptions and he didn't freak out although he did say oh we're not gonna have pink cabinets are we and I said no of course not so we're just gonna let this drip here my canning book which I'm gonna show you guys before we go it says to have this drain for two hours I may not have two hours but I am going to let it drip for a while and then I'm gonna cheat and I'm gonna squeeze some of this so it comes out faster I'm saving all of the cranberry pulp in this bowl because I have another fun canning project I'm going to be doing with it another day soon in the next day or so so all of this will go in the refrigerator until I can get to it so all the pulp from inside these towels needs to get back in here which is kind of a messy process even if it doesn't come out that's kind of pretty natural tie-dye the next step is we need to heat this back up we need to heat it to 190 degrees we can't let it come to a boil so we need to watch it once it gets to 190 degrees we need to turn down the heat and let it sit at 190 degrees for 5 minutes and after that we can start the canning process in the meantime I'm gonna get my water bath canner set up full of hot water turn it on so that it's going to be ready as soon as it's time for me to start putting the juice concentrate in the jars [Music] I always put a little bit of vinegar in my canning water so that I don't have to worry about much clean up on the jars keeps the outside of the jars really nice and clean the cranberry juice concentrate is all set and we can get started canning now I really have no idea how much this is going to produce so I got ready 12 pipe jars now I I can these in pipe jars because generally I will make a batch of juice at the half gallon and one pint jar of juice concentrate for us is perfect for a half gallon jar when you're canning this cranberry juice concentrate you want to fill the jars up and leave one quarter of an inch headspace at the top of the jar I'm just using a canning funnel which makes things a little bit easier makes things splash less and drip less now these jars are also hot you want to start with hot jars I'm using one of my measuring tools to make sure that it is a quarter inch from the top and it is and I'm going to wipe off the rim put the lid on now the new lids this year have a different formula that don't require you to warm them up before you put them on the jars they also will allow the contents of your jars to be good for 18 months according to them they used to say twelve months now they say 18 months it's up to you whether or not you want to push that limit but generally I can things that will last for one year or one and a half year by that time they're all going on our homestead so I don't really have to worry about long-term storage issues check that it is a quarter of an inch from the top wipe off the rim add a lid and a ring and we're going to put these two in the canning pot while they're all in there and now we're going to keep the heat on high and once it begins to boil inside of there I will set a timer now the pint jars or the quart jars need to process for 15 minutes however because we are over 1,000 feet above sea level I'm going to add another 5 minutes so we will be processing ours for 20 minutes after that I will open the lid and turn the heat off for 5 minutes before taking them out of the canning pot of the frozen fresh cranberries ended up making almost 10 pints of the cranberry juice concentrate the one that is almost filled I'm actually going to use tonight to make a batch of homemade cranberry juice for you guys plus so we can taste it and make sure that it's just as wonderful as I had remembered I want to quick share with you by a very very favourite canning book I've shared it on a lot of my other canning videos and it is actually the ball Complete Book of home preserving this has so many recipes and they're so fantastic and it has good instructions on how to water bath can and how to pressure can so if you are interested in learning more about this and one other canning book that I recommend you can check that out in our Amazon shop to learn more now I have one pint that didn't quite get filled up to the top so I'm actually going to use that tonight to make cranberry juice so one pint ish of the cranberry juice concentrate I'm just going to put it in a half-gallon mason jar that's generally what we were going to use around here and if I remember correctly the last time I made this I used 1/2 cup of sugar but it ended up too sweet for our family so today I'm going to use 1/3 cup of sugar to add into that I feel pretty proud that our family isn't really into super high sugary beverages or really anything for that matter they don't like kool-aid and we don't make super sugary lemonade I'm just going to mix the sugar in this concentrate right now the concentrate is warm it won't happen like that when I take it off the show I'm gonna fill this up with cold water and we'll have a taste isn't this the most gorgeous color Wow okay let's see how it is oh it's so good the amount of sugar is perfect so this is pretty awesome and if you remember back to the beginning of the video I said that really I have five dollars and fifty cents invested in all of this 55 cents per batch you can't even touch those prices with grocery store juice so not only is this easy is it healthier than grocery store you can you can choose how much sugar you put in it but you guys it's so much less expensive than buying juice at the store if you enjoyed this canning video make sure to check out our playlist of the other canning videos that I have on our channel I love to can I love to teach you guys how to do it as well you guys if you enjoyed this video and if you are liking our channel please go ahead and subscribe we would love it don't forget to check us out on all of our social media including Instagram and until next time thank you so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 538,000

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, homemade cranberry juice concentrate, homemade cranberry juice, making cranberry juice, canning cranberry juice concentrate, canning cranberry juice recipe

Id: Zvjqk_xOtiA

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 05 2019