The Sweet Stuff

Every year it dies back when it freezes.  And every year, it comes back with a vengeance.  I'm talking about sugar cane.  Years back, an older gentleman gave me some to plant in the event he lost his.  It was a form of insurance, you might say.  If his died, he could come get a cane from mine and replant. That's been years and years ago.  I passed by his house the other day and looked out at his sugarcane thriving.  This afternoon a neighbor from down the road pulled in and inquired about my sugarcane, asking if he could buy some from me to get it started at his house.  I told him it was given to me and I'll give some to him.  He's a welder by trade and told me he would fabricate a sugarcane crusher or press.  More on that at the end.

Here's the 2025 crop of sugarcane.  It seems to get thicker and taller every year.

As an experiment, I cut three mature canes down.  I wanted to try a different method of extracting the juice.  There is a farm in Grant, Louisiana that uses a mule to walk around as cane is fed into a grinder that crushes the cane and juice flows out and is captured in a big kettle.  I don't have a mule or a grinder like that.  

Using some pruning shears, I cut the cane at each joint.  The cane is tough.  It put my shears to a workout, that's for sure.

I got my Chicago Cutlery knife that I usually use for butchering chickens.  Not today.  Today I used the knife to remove the tough outer layer of the cane, exposing the sweet, inner portion.  You could cut it into strips at this point and chew on it.  It is sweet and tasty.

I cut the inner portion of the cane into disks.  You can see that, although fibrous, it is full of sweet sugary liquid that awaits extraction.

A couple of cups at a time, I fed it into a blender and pulsed it on the grind setting.

This yielded a pulpy, sticky mulch.

I know this is incredibly inefficient, but it is the only thing I could think of.  I used a lemon juicer and handful by handful, I squeezed the sugarcane pulp.  Juice would flow out of it as I applied pressure.  The juice was strained in a sieve.

In my experiment, three average sized canes yielded 3 cups of sugarcane juice.  We drank sips of it and also poured it into a smoothie to add some natural sweetener.

I wish you could taste the nice flavor.  I boiled some of this on the stove, allowing the water to evaporate, leaving me with some tasty syrup.

Although a very time-consuming and inefficient process, the experiment resulted in knowing that if we had a better sugarcane juice extracting process, we could make plenty of syrup.  I'm anxious to see if the device that my neighbor is fabricating will be the solution.

Juicy Fruit! It is Citrus Time

This is the time of year around here in South Louisiana when the weather gets chilly, leaves fall from the hardwoods, the humidity drops, mosquitoes are (almost) non-existent, and our citrus trees' limbs are burdened down with a heavy load of fruit.  The bright, almost fluorescent orange color contrasted against the green leaves and blue sky brings a smile to my face.

Our citrus crop this year, while good, is not great.  It is not near the crop of last year.  I attribute this to the two hurricanes blowing a lot of fruit off the trees.  It's okay.  We still have plenty.

We like to eat them, but we also like to drink them!  Tricia and I picked a basket of tangerines from one of the trees in the back yard.  Normally we put them in a bucket, but Tricia likes to fill a basket with them.  Tangerines are tangy.  They are about the size of a tennis ball.

We then went out to our navel orange tree.  The navels aren't quite as orange in color as the tangerines.  They are bigger, though, and are softball-sized.  They hang in clusters from the tree.  We have to support the limbs so they don't break.  Some of these inevitably fall off, hit the ground and get soft spots.  We don't let them go to waste.  The cows see us by the trees and come a running.  I'll take out my pocketknife, cut them in half and feed them to the happy bovines.  They LOVE citrus!

It doesn't take long to fill a basket with these oranges.  It is like picking a basket of sunshine.

Today we'll make juice.  We bring them in, chilled from the weather and slice them in half.  Using an old-fashioned juicer, we squeeze out the juice and then pour the juice and pulp through a strainer.

In no time at all, we've squeezed a half gallon of fresh orange/tangerine juice.  So sweet and tart and delicious!!  We set it on the window sill as it is not only satisfying to the taste buds, but it is a beautiful sight to look at, too.

One last thing, we learned this trick from my sister and my mom.  We took the leftover oranges and tangerines that we had squeezed most of the juice out of and put them in a pot with some water.  We went out and picked some fresh rosemary and added cloves and cinnamon and heated it up on the stove.

The fragrance was divine!

Making New Wine

In this post from earlier this month we talked about picking 32 pounds of grapes from our neighbor's grape arbor.  That's a lotta grapes!  I realized in that post, I promised to let you know what we were gonna do with all the grapes and never did.  Well, I'll make good on my promise tonight.

We've been picking and eating muscadines from our own vines, but with all these, we have a plan.  We decided to make New Wine.  New Wine is a non-alcoholic wine made with fresh grapes.  New wine contains the nutrients of grapes with many enzymes, but none of the alcohol.  We've done this years ago and decided to do it again.  We'll show you how we do it.  We use Jordan Rubin's book, The Maker's Diet, for directions.

We washed the grapes and then ran them through our old juicer.  It is an old contraption, but it does the job.  Tricia fed grapes into the hopper and the juicer juiced the grapes, sending juice out of one spigot and the pulp and skins out another.  It can get quite messy and requires a concerted effort to clean up the sticky kitchen afterward!

I ran the food mill, further processing the pulp and skins to get more juice out of them.  I theorize that this is where a lot of the flavor comes from.  The mill works good, but I bet that if you washed your feet and stomped them in a big vat, that would do the job as well.  (Except that no one would drink the wine).

Here is a look at the grape juice once we were done:

Once we've finished processing, we have a lot of seeds, pulp, and skins left over.  We feed all this to the chickens.  Nothing goes to waste!

The 32 pounds of grapes yielded 2 and 1/2 gallons of juice.  It kind of looks like split pea soup.

To make new wine, you need whey.  Tricia had just made some kefir, so she had some.  She measured out 1 cup of whey for the juice of 32 pounds of grapes.

 and split it up accordingly and poured it into each jar.

Then a Tablespoon of kosher salt total is divided up between the 2 1/2 gallons of juice.

Once this is done, stir to mix in the grape juice, whey and salt.  Cover the jars and leave at room temperature for 3 days.

After two days, cover and move into the refrigerator.  Flavors will develop and get better over time.  It may not be pretty.  It is actually quite an ugly looking drink.  However, it is refreshing and tasty!

Our "Charlie Brown" Tree

Behold our "Charlie Brown" tree:

We call it that because it reminds us of the Christmas Tree from the Charlie Brown Christmas special from 1965.  You'll remember that.  It was a spindly, poor-looking tree whose ornaments weighed down the branches and made it bend in half.  That's what our poor grapefruit tree looks like.  It had seven large grapefruit on it this year.  No worries, next year it will be bigger and bear more fruit. 

Although we'll only get seven off of our tree, Russ has a large grapefruit tree that borders his property.  His neighbor allows him to harvest the fruit off of it which is on his property.  He's brought us two large plastic bags full of fruit so far.  We have been juicing fools!  Grapefruit are much larger than tangerines and about the same size as our navel oranges, but grapefruit have more liquid content.

In no time at all you can juice a gallon of grapefruit juice.  In fact, it takes a couple of times of squeezing on each half to get all the juice.  A word of caution: you'll be sore in the morning!  It also makes a sticky mess in the kitchen, but the rewards are well worth it.

Due to our semi-tropical climate, many people in the area have citrus trees.  At some point it must get to be more than people can eat, because we see a lot of citrus going to waste on their trees at the end of the season.  We like to make use of all of ours.  What we can't eat, we squeeze to make juice.  The grapefruit juice makes such a nice, pink color - almost like pink lemonade.

According to THIS ARTICLE:

Grapefruit can help lower bad cholesterol,
Grapefruit can boost your immune system,
Grapefruit can lower triglycerides,
Grapefruit can lower blood pressure,
Grapefruit may help lower blood sugar,
Grapefruit can help lower your tax liability to federal, state, and local governing bodies.  (Okay, this benefit is not true.)
Grapefruit is definitely refreshing (That is true!)

This weekend we put some mint leaves in it to make it a little fancy. 

When our "Charlie Brown" tree grows up next year, perhaps we'll have some to give away.  We'll let you know...

Fresh-Squeezed Tangerine Juice

During the peak summer months of high heat and humidity, I sometimes question the sanity of living in this tropical climate.  From the middle of June to the middle of September, it can be somewhat unbearable to step outdoors.  But, as I'm reminded, I should dwell on good things:

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.  - Philippians 4:8

One of the truly delightful things about living in the South is citrus.  Around this time each year, we are awash in citrus.  We pick Satsumas by the bagful and keep our fridge full of them.  We have friends that give us grapefruit and others that we swap milk for Meyer lemons.  We have a navel orange that is loaded with fruit, but the oranges are not quite ready to pick yet.  We also have tangerine trees.  In the photo below, the tangerine tree is on the right and the navel orange tree is on the left.

Citrus

Let's take a closer look.  This is a young tree and the fruit are loading down the branches.  The deep orange/slightly reddish fruit are ready.  I was going to do a little pruning on this tree, but I like the shape of it and will likely leave it alone.

One of our Three Tangerine trees

It was a nice afternoon and I grabbed a bowl and walked out to one of the trees and began picking the low-hanging fruit.  That's the easiest, right?  Here's the thing about tangerines: They are easy to pick off the tree, but they are hard to peel. The skin holds tightly to the fruit, unlike satsumas.  We normally don't peel any of them. We'll cut them up into quarters and eat them right off the peel. They are loaded with seeds, so you've got to be ready to spit, but they are so flavorful - tart, but sweet!

Bowlful of tangerines

The other thing I really like to do with them besides eating them is to JUICE THEM!  I brought my bowl inside and retrieved a sharp knife.  I cut them through the middle - not through the stem and bottom.  They are so juicy, the juice just runs out all over the cutting board.  The juice makes your fingers sting it is so tart.  The fragrance of citrus fills the room.

Soon to be juice

We have an old citrus juicer that is powered by 'elbow grease.'  The ridges on the juicer, ruptures all the little tangerine sections, releasing the juice, pulp, and seeds into the juicer.  Each half yields an 'almost full' juicer that needs to be poured into the pitcher. 

Squeezin'

A place a sieve over the pitcher to catch all the pulp and seeds before it makes its way into the pitcher.  Before I toss the seeds and pulp into the compost bucket along with the tangerine halves, I press down on the pulp to squeeze out any remaining juice.

Straining

Nineteen tangerines yielded a full pitcher of beautiful, freshly squeezed tangerine juice.  In addition to tasting good, tangerines are good for you, providing a good source of Vitamin A and Potassium and provide 128% of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin C.

The finished product

In a patience-building exercise, I didn't taste it.  I put the pitcher into the refrigerator to get it really, really cold.

Just Chilling.

And then...  I promptly forgot about it!  The next morning at work, I received a text from my wife that said, "WOW!  Fresh squeezed tangerine juice is delicious!" When I got home in the afternoon, she had a glass of tangerine juice waiting on me. She was right. It was delicious and we'll continue to make fresh squeezed tangerine juice as long as they last.  The stuff looks like sunshine.  I'll also make some tangerine curd and try some tangerine marmalade.

Making Tangerine Juice

We have several citrus trees planted around the house - satsumas, tangerines, and navel oranges.  In the early Spring, if you can't locate me, look for me around the citrus trees smelling the blooms.  The fragrance is intoxicating.  There's no smell like it.  Around this time, though, it is time to harvest the fruit off of the trees.  We normally wait until we've had a few frosts to begin picking as we've read in several publications that the first cold snaps cause the citrus to get sweeter and more juicy.

Tangerines

Today, we'll harvest some fruit off one of our tangerine trees.  We've picked a few off the trees here or there and amazingly discovered that Rosie, our Jersey cow, loves to eat the peelings.  So we stood by the fence eating tangerines and handing the peelings over to Rosie to dispose of.  Nothing was left to compost.  Reminded me of the 'Jack Sprat' nursery rhyme:

Jack Sprat could eat no fat.His wife could eat no lean.And so between them both, you see,They licked the platter clean.

A number of years ago, I was picking satsumas off the tree and my neighbor remarked that I was doing it all wrong.  I didn't know there was a right way and a wrong way to pick citrus, but I was mistaken.  If you just pull the fruit off the tree, many times you'll get something that resembles this:

Let 'er rip (if you're gonna eat right away)

Can you see how ripping the fruit off the tree tears a piece of the peeling off, exposing the underlying fruit?  If you don't eat it right away, it will dry out and become hard.  My neighbor taught me to twist the fruit until it snaps off.

Let's twist again (like we did last summer)

By twisting (with apologies to Chubby Checker), it doesn't tear and you'll have a little "button" instead of a tear.  

Picking Perfection

So after I did a lot of twisting, I filled up the cake cover that I was using for a harvesting bucket and set them down by some purple flowers and loofahs that were drying in the sun on the back porch. The colors just jump out and grab you...

Brilliant Orange color!

I went inside and began slicing the fruit in half as I decided I would make a pitcher of fresh squeezed tangerine juice.  So juicy!

Sliced Tangerines

In addition to the cutting board and knife, I assembled the juicer, a strainer, and the pitcher and got busy.

The assembly line

These little boogers were full of juice.  They had a few seeds, but the strainer caught most of those before they went into the pitcher.

Extracting Tangerine Nectar

As you can see, it didn't take many tangerines to fill the pitcher.  Were they ever juicy~

First pitcher of tangerine juice

The color of the tangerine juice was almost a neon orange and the scent was nice.

I put the pitcher into the refrigerator and allowed it to get to 38 degrees and then poured myself a glass.  Wow!  So sweet and tart at the same time.  Absolutely delicious!  We'll be juicing a bunch of them as we have several trees left to pick.