The Craftiest Workshop

This summer I wrote a blog about picking Saskatoon berries on our property and in our neighbour’s yard. I froze them on cookie sheets then put them into the freezer in large ziplock bags. I had an entire shelf in my upright freezer jammed full of Saskatoons. By the end of the summer I ended up with nine large ziplock bags full of them. Earlier in December, with Christmas baking season upon me, I decided that I needed to process some of the berries to make room in the freezer for some of my baking.

On a recent work trip to Edmonton, my husband bought me a Mehu-Liisa steam juicer at Lee Valley. I knew it would work well for Saskatoons and am hoping that next year I can put whole rose hips in it to extract the juice instead of having to cut and core each one.

For my first batch I decided to try to juice two full large ziplock bags of Saskatoons.

The juicer comes in three parts: a pot which you fill with water, the juice collector, and the steamer basket.

All you have to do is fill the bottom pot with water, bring it to a boil then place the juice collector and basket of berries on top with the lid. Just over an hour later, all the juice is steamed out of the berries and you can extract the juice by unclipping the rubber hose on the side. It acts like a siphon once you start the juice flowing.

For this batch, I added 1/4 cup of sugar on top of each bags worth of berries right in the steamer basket. This way I could pour the juice from the tube right into hot jars and seal with the lids and rings I had heated. The juice reminds me of drinking grape juice. I like to add some to a large glass of water just to give it some flavour. These are Classico pasta jars that each hold about 2.5 cups. Two bags of berries gave me 7.5 cups of juice.

For my second attempt using the steamer, I processed three bags of Saskatoons with the plan of making syrup. I used the first five cups of juice (no sugar over the berries this time), collecting it in this 8 cup measuring cup.

I poured the five cups into another large pot and added 7 cups of sugar. After it came to a rolling boil, I boiled it 3 minutes stirring continuously. I removed it from the stove and ladled it into my hot prepared jars. As you can see, I used a variety of sizes of jars for the syrup.

While the Saskatoon syrup was cooking, I allowed the remaining juice to slowly drip into the measuring cup. I got another six cups of juice concentrate (three bags of berries=11 cups of concentrate). After letting it cool in the refrigerator, I put it into some plastic cool whip containers and put it in the freezer. It will make an easy start to make some Saskatoon jelly sometime in early 2023.

The juice extracted was really clear. I left the first batch a little longer just to make sure it was long enough after using frozen berries. Tasting some of the berry pulp, there was no sweet moisture left in it. It was so dry that even the birds were not interested in it. I left a pile where I know the deer frequent and, after awhile, I noticed that either the deer or coyotes had eaten it.

The system did come with a small instruction manual with English as the fourth language in it. There were not a lot of recipes in there so I went online to see what I could find. Someone has posted a PDF of an e-book which has a lot more content.

https://bigmountain.kitchen/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/mehu-liisa-recipesebook.pdf

Using the system was easy. You can pretty much set it up and walk away for an hour. The water in the pan only boils down a little bit (there is a warning to not let the pan run dry). The way the juice collector sits in the pan with water, it doesn’t allow the water to boil over. As long as you pinch the juice tube with the clip and hang it upwards, the juice will not leak out. It also takes awhile for that tube to fill once you see juice in it. Aside from making fruit or vegetable juice concentrate, you could also make vegetable broth for soups. Overall, it has a lot of versatility and I know that it was worth the purchase for me.

I should mention that although we had lots of ground moisture in spring of 2022 due to lots of melting snow, there was almost no rain the entire summer. I imagine that in a wetter summer, the picked berries would extract more juice. I did pick in the early morning which is when the berries have the most moisture content.