I picked some more crabapples a few days ago, then left them in the
plastic grocery bag in the cab of my truck. When I went to retrieve
them yesterday, they had deteriorated quite a bit. But they didn't look
moldy or smell like vinegar, so I decided to juice them -- for practice
if nothing else. My last atempt to juice crabapples was disasterous.

Someone told me a that an old book on preserving said you could get 2 or
3 extractions from crabapples and they would all make good jelly,
although only the first extraction would be clear. So I figured I could
add a lot more water on that first (and only) extraction. I rinse the
apples and picked out the leaves, then dumped them in a stainless steel
stockpot. Instead of adding a cup of water per pound like I did last
time, I covered these with water, plus another 1/2". I simmered them
about half an hour, then mashed them with a potato masher. The potato
masher didn't work all that well because some of these apples were too
small. I got out my large sieve and started scooping up the cooked
apples and mashing them through the seive with the back of a spoon.
That worked very well, better than using a food mill. I discarded a lot
of the stems and seeds and skins this way and had a pot of juicy
applesauce with some stray seeds and stems in it.

It took a little experimenting, but I came up with what I think is a
pretty good way to strain the juice. I used a square of muslin for the
jelly bag. I dampened it with water, and stuffed it into a Tupperware
pitcher to make a bag, then poured in a most of the sauce (it wouldn't
all fit.) I gathered the ends of the cloth together and pulled it up
out the pitcher to drip. It was running kind of slow, so after a few
minutes I squeezed it a little, but it was too hot. I poured the
contents of the bag back into the pot. There was maybe 1/2 cup of juice
in the pitcher. I decided to do smaller batches. I put about a half of
the sauce back in the bag and let it drip; when it was cool enough to
handle I squeezed it -- gently at first, but at the end I squeezed it
really hard by twisting the top of the bag tightly until I was afraid
the muslin might tear. I discarded the damp ball of seeds and pulp and
loaded up the bag again with about half the remaining sauce. Repeat.
Then I dumped all the juice I had collected back into the pot and heated
the slurry back up again. I poured all the stuff into the bag and
hanged it from a skyhook to drip overnight. This morning, perfect
juice. (I did squeeze the bag gently this morning to collect a little
more juice from it. If it were coarser cloth I wouldn't have squeezed it.)

In summary, here's the trick for fruit that's hard to juice: Squeeze
most of the cooked fruit hard to get a lot of cloudy juice fairly
quickly. Pour the cloudy juice back into the reserved cooked fruit,
heat it back up, and drip it overnight just by gravity.

Now I gotta decide if I want to use the long boil method, or add Certo
and lots more sugar, so I get more jelly. I'm not sure which is
supposed to taste better.

Bob