Cold extraction apple juice (no cooking)

Two widely known methods to get at the juice of apples have been handed down over the centuries, cooking cut apples and pressing raw shredded apples. But there is a third one made possible by more recent technology: using a standard freezer.

No fancy juicer needed. For small batches, no press is needed. A kitchen fridge freezer compartment works just fine for smaller amounts of fruit.

Freezer extraction of apple juice
1. Wash apples as needed, skin them (or leave skins on), cut and remove core.
2. Shred apples in a standard kitchen veggie cutter. Most machines have three settings, coarse, medium, and fine. "Coarse", or thin slices, is sufficient, and it is fast.
Important: Do not drain the shredded apples. You want them wet, we'll explain below.
3. Fill containers suitable for deep freezing with the shredded apples. Put them into a freezer, and wait for at least a day or so until you feel like continuing.
4. Remove as many containers as you want, let them thaw completely at room temperature.
5. For small batches, use grandma's cotton kitchen towel method to get the juice out. Fill the towel to about one third or half, squeeze. Put the drier pulp away to re-freeze for later use in baked goods like apple bread. Alternatively, make apple vinegar with the pulp.
If you have a press, use that. Don't use a juicer on the thawed apples, you will only get fine pulp.

Done.

You are now ready to freeze the juice, pasteurize and bottle it, make apple jelly, or cider.

Why you want your shredded apples wet
Engineers have spent a lot of effort to produce freezers that don't destroy the cell walls of whatever you freeze. "Flash freezing" accomplishes this, preventing fruit, meat, and berries from getting freezer burn or turning into mush.
However, to get as much juice out as possible, you want the shredded apples to become pretty mushy, so keeping the moisture created by shredding is exactly what we need. This helps to break down the cell walls that lock in the juice.

Traditionally, this is the reason for cooking cut apples and for the use of high-pressure cider/grape presses.

Cold extraction with the freezer method preserves nutrients that get destroyed by cooking. Pressing of raw (not frozen or cooked apples) is so slow that yeast can start to turn the sugars in the juice into cider - which won't happen with the freezer method.

The freezer method works the same way for other fruit, too. It makes little sense for soft berries, but harder ones with less juice, for example, mountain ash berries or sloe berries can benefit.

If the apples come from your own trees or from an orchard of friends or family,you may want to check out this post about removing lichen and moss to help trees remain healthy and productive. Painting a whole tree white is also great fun!

[Update 10/25/2015]
Homemade multi-purpose press
We looked at wine and fruit presses on the web, and found them wanting. You can buy cheap ones to assemble yourself. No wooden parts included is not what the blogster is willing to go for. Decent ones are easily upwards of 200 dollars.

Round is the basic design everywhere. This is not adequate if you want to use a press for other purposes, like making paper. Communion wafers? Sure, but the size of a wine press?

So, we made our own as shown in this picture. Square, with a groove on the bottom plate, four long bolts with win nuts for pressure, and kitchen towels to hold the thawed apples.

The version in this photo is the first try, with a capacity of about 1 gallon. In the meantime, we added diagonal bracers.

The square design, by the way, is also a traditional wine/cider press design, although the centuries old version understandably comes with a center spindle like any modern press.

It works like a song. If you want one, we'll make one to your specifications (as long as they don't violate the physics of pressure distribution). Send an email to the contact mail at the top of the blog, and we'll provide a quote.