Hey there… been a while since I’ve checked in here.
I recently acquired a fruit press that looks something like this:
I also got a couple wine boxes full of pears from my friend’s tree.
Last night, took the pears and began chopping them up pretty fine in a food processor. I dumped those into the fruit press until the basket was fairly full. (This amounted to 4-5 Cuisinart’s worth, and at least 1/10th the pears I had.)
After tightening down the press about as far as I figured it’d go, I had collected a little over 600ml of juice. I’d never pressed cider before, so I was very surprised by the poor yield. I knew that if I kept this up, I’d be at it all night and would end up with about a gallon and a half of juice. So I aborted.
I guess my question is… was this to be expected? Something wrong with the pears? Did I go about my pre-press treatment wrong? Is it actually supposed to be as cumbersome a process as this turned out to be? (Filling the basket with the metal crossbar in the way… sloooooowly raising the screw shaft back up so you can empty out the basket and start over… and a few other things in my process that could probably be tweaked but are just tinkering around the edges…)
I was pretty excited to get this press, but man…
Is this thing just not designed for harder fruit like pear or apple? Maybe something with more liquid like grapes or peaches would be easier and faster to deal with?
