Bought a juicer. A Cuisinart, on sale. More precisely, it’s a juice extractor. Fruit or vegetables go in, spin around while little blades separate the pulp from the juice.
First to go in is rhubarb. Here’s how it worked out for me. The quantities I give are for the pitcher on my juicer, which holds 32 ounces (4 cups or .95 L).
Prepare the rhubarb, set the juicer speed
Wash about 18 rhubarb stalks and chop into 4-5″ lengths (10-12 cm). The juicer manual didn’t include rhubarb in its speed settings guide. So I chose the 2nd fastest, same as what’s recommended for pears or celery. I figured they were close to the consistency of rhubarb.
Feed the tube
Feed the rhubarb pieces into the juicer tube a few at a time. My juice container holds 32 ounces. In this picture, it’s too full. See the darker liquid and foamy stuff above the band near the top? You don’t want that in your juice. A barrier inside the pitcher holds back most of it but it still leaches into the spout. I skimmed off as much as I could, trying not to mix it into the juice below. That’s easier to do if the jug fills only to the top mark.
Strain the juice
Pour the juice from the pitcher into a measuring cup. Leave the lid on the pitcher – it also helps block the foamy stuff. And, although it’s hard to co-ordinate your hands, it helps a lot if you also use a cheesecloth-lined sieve for this initial pouring. Keep the flow as even as possible and watch it as you near the bottom. Stop pouring when you start to see the cloudy, green residue enter the flow. Throw that out.
Next pour the juice into another bowl or pitcher through a cheesecloth-lined sieve. Rinse the cheesecloth and container to remove residue and foam. Then filter the juice back and forth between pitchers a few times to strain out as much foam and residue as you can.
Add water and sweeten
Measure the amount of juice and heat the same amount of water. For 4 cups water, I add 1/2 cup sugar. Stir until it dissolves. Pour into the pitcher of rhubarb juice and mix well.
Taste it. Add a bit of sugar or water if needed. If you can’t fix it without losing flavour, make more juice and mix the two to correct the proportions. A splash of lemon juice brightens the taste, if needed.
Bottle
Put a funnel in your juice bottle and pour your juice in. You can line the funnel with a bit of cheesecloth if you want to do one more filtration.
The juice will foam up in the bottle. If you’re using a flexible container, gently squeeze it to make the juice move up the neck. The foam will rise so you can scoop it off. Be careful to not squeeze too hard. It can pop up and you’ll have juice all over the counter. I know; it happened.
One juicer load of rhubarb made one 1.89 L bottle of rhubarb juice.
Is a juicer easier?
I don’t know if the juicer is any easier or better than making juice by draining cooked rhubarb through a sieve (here’s how to do that). You get a completely raw product using the juicer. But you also get the weird green foam, which you don’t get by cooking and sieving.
You go from picking your rhubarb to having a finished bottle of juice more quickly using the juicer because you don’t have to stop and wait for gravity to act. But the quantity you can make at one time is limited by what the jug holds. One bottle rather than the usual two I make using sieved juice. However, both methods result in equally good tasting juice.
