Month: March 2019

  • Starting a Homestead In a Remote Area.

    Starting a Homestead In a Remote Area.

    Once you have decided to start your own Homestead one of the questions will be: where are we going to start our Homestead?

    Are you thinking of starting a Homestead in a remote area, please read on.

    Sure, I would not want to stop you from doing so. We did move out into the countryside, far from the city buzz and pollution. And we enjoy it very much.

    There are some things you really should consider though. Making the wrong choice here could make your dream more challenging than you thought. If you do choose for remoteness you better be prepared for the challenge.

    So when you have this itching tendency to get away as far as possible from where you are now, this is why you should not follow that feeling blindly.

    By the way: our place is about 6 km (15 min) from a small town and 20 km (45 min) from a bigger town with more facilities and shops. The roads are of a good quality. The area is very low populated. We are just far enough to have the remote feeling and close enough to have excess to what we need.

    The Long Way to the Shop

    Ones you are out in your Homestead you will be self-sufficient, that is why you do not need a shop any more. Wouldn’t that be ideal? Yes, I agree. But how realistic is it. Just look around in your house and you will know.

    Screwdrivers, screws, plates, jars, batteries, solar panels, building bricks, hinsches, saws, they do not grow in trees. And even if you are a handywoman like me, you will not be able to make everything yourself.

    Especially at the beginning. You will be lucky when your vegetable garden is a success in year one. Your just planted fruit trees will only carry enough fruit after about 6 years. How are you going to get your trees for planting? What are you going to eat those first years?

    The remoter you are the harder it becomes to get your Homestead going. Being in the mountains or living on the water can make it even harder.

    Even if your ultimate goal is to be totally self sufficient you will still need a shop every now and then when that time comes.

    It is an illusion to think you will never attend a shop anymore when you move out. The contrary might be the case. In the first years we travelled many kilometers to find all our building material.

    We have a big vegetable garden, but some years we simply do not manage to maintain it well enough because of all the activities on the farm. Like improving the goat shelter, making fences and taking care of our fruit trees. So some times of the year we use the vegetable shop to keep us fed.

    Although we have a lot ourselves, we still buy things from the supermarket. Every month we spend some 200€ in the supermarket. It might not be a lot, but we still have to go there.

    The same counts for the animal feeds, it is very hard to get all the feed from our farm, so we buy extra. It all pays back at the end. Which brings me to another consideration.

    Market stall

    Selling Products From Your Homestead

    Whether it is milk, cheese and eggs or handicraft. You will have to travel to the people to sell your products. Even if it is only to the local post office to ship your goods to your clients.

    If you want to live from your farm and sell some products you will need some clientele that lives not to far away from you.

    Being on a remote Homestead might mean you have to travel long distances to sell your things, which might not make it worth doing. In that case making a living becomes a real challenge.

    II am very happy our farm is just a 15 minutes drive from the small town of Monchique. This makes running a market stall every Friday to sell our produce very possible. We combine it with a Friday social lunch in one of the towns lovely restaurants and it makes it into a pleasure.

    Neighbours and Job Opportunities

    Many Homesteaders in the area where we live do small jobs for others. Like land maintenance, rental management, garden work or dog sitting or other things. Maybe you had something similar in mind.

    If so, consider living not too far from the people you want to work for. Here in the mountains the windy roads consume a lot of traveling time. A friend, whose land I can see from the top of our land lives 45 min driving (walking takes even longer) away.

    When you live in a big city, driving to your work in 45 minutes is not an exception. But be prepared to find the same kind of driving times to your work in the countryside. Going too remote will make these kind of jobs very hard to persevere.

    I gave up my rental management activities because the driving from one property to the other simply costed to much (unpaid) time. Now I am running my blog partly from home and partly from an office in the small town. My internet is too costly to run it all from home. There is always hurdles to take when you live remote, but I am happy as it works now.

    Internet & mobile phone

    A thing that might have crossed your mind is selling stuff through the internet. Which is very possible if you are doing some sort of affiliate sales or if you provide a service.
    You do need to make sure that there is internet reception in your place. There are some pretty good satellite facilities. But they will most likely be more expensive than the internet provider that you are used to.

    Ones you have internet you could also run your mobile phone on it. But do not expect any phone reception in remote areas.

    Cat

    Doctor and Vet

    When you want to live remote it is all going to be far away.

    A doctor and a vet (in case you want animals) can be needed in an emergency. It is a good thing to check whether they are around.

    The very friend that lives 45 min drive away, one time was unblocking her water pipe with an iron rod. It got stuck in the pipe and she tried to pull it out of the pipe. It suddenly came loose and drove right through her knee sticking out the other side of her knee. She managed to get it out herself and drive herself to the hospital. She was incredibly lucky. With a bit less luck she would have died in her remote place. Which is in the end only 10 km from the small town. Imagine being really remote.

    I realise this is a shocking story, but it is a reality to take into account. Working with a chainsaw or even an hand ax is not without danger. I will never use my chainsaw when there is nobody else on the land.

    I also realise that the distance to the small town which has an ambulance increases my chance of surviving an accident. The example with my friend shows that you do not need a chainsaw to have a bad accident.

    I was also very happy that I could drive one of my goats to the vet quickly after she had eaten very poisonous rhododendron.

    Very remote means you will have to deal with these life threatening things all by yourself. I would find that very stressful.

    Kids at School

    When you have children, a daily drive to school can be an effort when the school is far away. It is just another time consuming thing. Time that you would rather like to spend on your farm.

    Homeschooling is an alternative, but do not underestimate the time that it takes either. Sure it are your kids and you want the best for their future. Homeschooling however can be quite intense when it is combined with running a self-sustainable place. When you are very remote it might also be hard for the kids to meet other kids. Something the kids might also appreciate at a certain age. Some parents around here got really fed up driving their kids around for miles to other kids.

    Cabin fever

    Ever heard of cabin fever? Sometimes you just have to get out. Go to town, see and speak to other people. You get so restless that you just have to go. This is called cabin fever. It is well known amongst remote living Homesteaders.

    I always notice when people have cabin fever. They come by and drink a cup of tea at ours. And chat, and chat, and chat, endlessly. Then they say goodby and go into town just to be among more people. I do not know anybody around here who does not have it every now and then. You might have it too.

    Some people also like to be involved in social things in town to avoid the cabin fever. They are a member of a church or an association and do some good work in town.

    So again, being remote means being far away from social activities you might not like now, but also might miss ones you are remote.

    Wanting to move out

    Coming from a town’s life in a very busy country I do know the feeling of wanting to move out. I had that feeling. And I did move out.

    I had the feeling that I moved into the middle of nowhere, that feeling changed as things improved around us. It was very funny.

    When I came to live on our Homestead I had the feeling I was living very remote. My husband was a lot in Holland still to work and I was a lot on my own.

    Now my feeling is completely different. The road got improved, neighbours moved in, we have a much more suitable car for this area, we have a proper internet connection, many things have improved. Knowing what it is like to live remote as was the case at the beginning, I am so happy with these changes that brought me closer to the community.

    It gives me the opportunity to run a business. To be able to sell our produce and run my blog makes our chance to keep on living where we are now, so much higher. I enjoy the place where we are a lot. I can see the sea on the horizon, hear the birds singing and breath clean air. It’s golden.

    Summarised & find out more

    If you want to move out into a remote place take the distance have to drive to all that still bind you to a community. Like the distance to the shop for tools or for groceries, the job that you make money with at your neighbours, the vet, the school from your kids and the social events you might want to join. We are more connected to the world we live in then we think.

    Moving out far is worth considering very careful. Being in the world we are in now moving as far away as we can might seem very attractive, but as it has good sides it has challenging sides as well. It is important te be prepared for this move.

    Find out more about what it takes to start a Homestead.

    Check this blogpost by clicking on the links:

    5 Phases in Building a Homestead

    Preparing for Your Homestead.

    5 Reasons Why We Started Our Homestead

    The Best Homestead Location and the Position of the Sun

    Finding A Homestead Location With Good And Sufficient Fresh Water

     

    Starting a Homestead

  • Cooking Cheese and Spinach Quiche with Fresh Farm Ingredients.

    Cooking Cheese and Spinach Quiche with Fresh Farm Ingredients.

    This blog is written by Anna Tonk. She volunteered at Terra do Milho for two month.

    What happens in the kitchen during winter on a Homestead?

    Living on a Homestead and having to cook for the hardworking people there seemed like a daunting task, because usually as a city dweller I am used to having everything on hand around the corner. Everything is pre-cut, ready-to-eat, or prepared using all sorts of baking mixes

    Hence my cooking started with a slight anxious feeling trying to think of a suitable recipe for the available ingredients.

    [button_simple link=”https://terradomilho.eu/2019/01/learning-easy-homesteading-skills-seasonal-cooking/” target=”_orange” background_color=”#ffffff” border_color=”#000″ text_color=”#000″ ]Click here for more about Seasonal Cooking[/button_simple]

    How to cook with fresh farm ingredients ?

    When you start really thinking about your meal, the farm suddenly becomes your playground, like a giant pantry full of surprises, new flavours, odd fruits and vegetables, and you discover you have everything on hand already. Or you could just go and search on the internet (or browse Monique’s cabinet full of cookbooks) for a recipe with some of the main ingredients found on the farm.

    Beets, carrots, apple, potatoes and a freshly picked laurel leaf became beetroot soup. Potato, onion and picked leaf-cabbage became Korean pancakes accompanied by found-in-pantry soy-sauce with garlic from the land and homemade sambal. But the loveliest recipe of the first week was probably the goat cheese and spinach quiche.

    There are chickens on the land so for this recipe we only had to use flour, butter and cream that weren’t from Terra do Milho.

    Cheese and Spinach Quiche

     

    For the crust:

    – 1 ½ cup all-purpose flour
    – 2 tablespoons full grain flour added when the dough seems too wet (and to add a little fiber)
    – 140 gr cold diced butter (10 tablespoons)
    – one large egg  mixed with 2 tablespoons of icy cold water
    – pinch of salt

    Whisk the egg and water together in a separate cup or little bowl. Then in a larger mixing bowl mix the flour with the salt and mash in the butter with a fork, or use the blender until everything looks like crumbs. Add the whisked egg and water. If the dough is too sticky add the whole grain flour, if it’s too crumbly still, add some water. Butter the pie dish and sprinkle some flour on top, your quiche will come out easily! Spread  the dough over the pie dish with a spoon (or with cold hands) and make holes in the bottom with a fork (no soggy bottom!). Put it in the fridge (this will ensure good baking results).

    For the filling:

    – 4-5 eggs
    – Whatever vegetables that go well with goat cheese (spinach)
    – 1 onion and 2 cloves of garlic
    – Half a homemade goat cheese
    – 200 ml cream
    – salt and pepper (and additional spices if you want to)
    – Some fresh chopped parsley

    Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Chop your vegetables, the onion and the garlic in small pieces. Sautee the onions and garlic in some oil or butter and add the vegetables. Cook until done and drain the moisture out of the pan. Put all the vegetables in a strainer to drain. Whisk the cream and the eggs together very well. Season it and mix in the vegetables. Take the crust in the pie dish out of the fridge and fill it up with the filling. Set the oven timer to 30 minutes, or check until the quiche is a deep golden brown (see picture!). It may even take 40 minutes. Serve in the pie dish! For garnish just put some parsley on top, but it is also nice to eat fresh with the quiche.

    Good luck in the kitchen at Terra do Milho. There is always something that you will discover you can eat.

    Spinach Quiche

     

  • 4 Easy to Learn Homesteading Kitchen Skills for Starters

    4 Easy to Learn Homesteading Kitchen Skills for Starters

    When you want to start your own Homestead (or just started one) you can feel overwhelmed with all the things you need to learn.

    This is how we tackled the feeling of being overwhelmed: we took our time. There is no way you will be able to learn everything at once when you have your Homestead.

    The good news is: you can start learning some of the skills without having your dreamed Homestead.

    In this blog we will introduce you to 4 easy to learn kitchen skills that you can start learning right now:

     

    4 skills that you will need when you have your Homestead with your own vegetable garden and fruit trees. All 4 skills are more deeply discussed in linked blogs as you will find out down below.

    Vegetable gardening for beginners

    Seasonal Cooking, That Is What You Are Very Likely Going to Do.

     

    When you will have your own Homestead with your own vegetable garden, seasonal cooking will be the thing you will do.

    Seasonal cooking is different from cooking with non-seasonal ingredients. For example: it is end of summer and there is an abundance of tomatoes, bell peppers and zucchinis. You need to find or design recipes that use exactly these ingredients.

    Other times of the year like in spring there are only broad beans and peas to cook with.

    In that case you will need a variety of recipes with broad beans or peas that taste very different from each other.

    As you practice you will get better at it without boring your family members with broad beans or peas.

    As you go, you can start making your own database with recipes that use broad beans, peas, tomatoes, bell peppers and/or zucchinis.

    In my blog: “Learning Easy Homesteading Skills: Seasonal Cooking” I explain how seasonal cooking works. Click here to get to the blog.

    Canning

    Canning, a Must Have Homesteading Skill.

     

    Canning is something that is also very connected to having your own vegetable garden. Having a well working vegetable garden usually means having more to harvest than you can eat. The same will happen when you have a well producing fruit tree (or trees). There will be too much fruit to eat.

    Because canning is an easy skill that you can learn anywhere, why not start learning it now? It will save you a lot of stress later when you will have the pressure of growing vegetables that want to be harvested.

    But what are you going to can when you do not have a vegetable garden?

    No problem, just buy some. When you stick to seasonal vegetables and fruit it is most likely very affordable.

    In my blog: “Learning Easy Homesteading Skills: Canning” I will tell you all you need to know about canning. It gives you a simple way of starting to can and also tells you how you can do your canning save.

    Click here to get to the blog.

    Dehydrating

    The Advantages of Dehydrating Fruit and Vegetables

     

    Every year our trees carry fruit. It starts in early summer with apricots followed by plums then apples and pears a bit later in the summer. In fall we have our lemons, oranges and persimmons ripening. Once your Homestead is well established you will probably have the same richness as we are having now.

    Dehydrating has some good advantages over other ways of preserving food. It is quick, easy, does not take a lot of storing space and keeps the vitamins in the vegetable or fruit.

    It is a very easy to learn skill and it gives a lot of joy eating the dried fruit. With a dehydrator you can also make fruit leather and candied fruit. And then you could dip the candied fruit in chocolate, making your own candies. It’s a lot of fun.

    I wrote a blog about Dehydrating in which I explain how it works and what is needed for it. I also explain how the advantages of dehydrating work out.

    Click here to go to the blog: The Advantages Of Dehydrating Fruit And Vegetables

    Juice

    Why Using A Steam Juicer Is A Good Idea

     

    Apart from canning and dehydrating fruit, I love to make juices from our home grown fruit.

    Using a Steam Juicer makes Juicing to an easy job. Pick the fruit, wash it, put it in the steamer and after about an hour I have got some bottles filled with pasteurised fruit juice. When the juice is filled into well sterilised bottles and is well sealed it will keep forever.

    The juice can be good for drinking, but also serves as a good ingredient for making jellies or sauces or even wines.

    I especially like to use the steam juicer for soft fruit.

    In my blog: “Why Using A Steam Juicer Is A Good Idea”, you will find exactly why I think Steam Juicing is great. Click on the title to find out more about it.

    4 easy skills in 4 blogs

     

    This being just an overview of 4 skills that you can learn right now while you are still dreaming about your own Homestead, I would like to invite you to check out my blogs:

    Learning Easy Homesteading Skills: Seasonal Cooking

    Learning Easy Homesteading Skills: Canning

    The Advantages of Dehydrating Fruit and Vegetables

    Why Using A Steam Juicer Is A Good Idea

    I wish you a lot of reading pleasure!

    Homesteading

  • The Advantages of Dehydrating Fruit and Vegetables

    The Advantages of Dehydrating Fruit and Vegetables

    Don’t you know what to do with an overload of fruit and vegetables in summer and fall?
    Do you only have little time for preserving your dear harvest?
    Is your pantry not big enough to store all the goodies from the land?

    This blogpost contains affiliate links. By using this link to buy a product we will earn a small commission. This way we will be able to continue providing you with the best information we have about Homesteading. 

    Here is what you can do: dehydrate your fruit and vegetables.

    Check this short video to see what a dehydrator is and how it works.

    An overload of fruit and vegetables in summer and fall.

    Every year our trees carry fruit. It starts in early summer with apricots followed by plums then apples and pears a bit later in the summer. In fall we have our lemons, oranges and persimmons ripening.

    Some trees carry a lot of fruit, like our plum and persimmon trees. The persimmon trees can carry up to 100 kg. The plum trees something like 80 kg. Far too much to make jam from or to can. We would never eat all that jam or canned fruit in a years time. So I find the dehydrator a good solution to deal with these big amounts of fruit. Combined with the use of a steam juicer and with canning I manage to process a lot of it.

    Another thing that I love to dehydrate is tomatoes. Every year we have an overload of tomatoes in fall. Dehydrated tomatoes are very tasty and can be used the rest of the year when there are no fresh ones. They are lovely in pasta dishes .

    By dehydrating you will preserve vitamins.

    Our apple and pear trees carry less, but I still like to use the dehydrator to preserve these fruits since dehydrating means keeping the vitamins preserved as well. Apple and pear sauce tastes very good and I do make it, but by heating the fruit vitamins get lost. This is not so much the case when you dehydrate your fruit. So dehydrating is also a healthy way to preserve fruit and vegetables.

    Dehydrating is Easy and quick

    For canning or jam making a lot of steps are required. Not so much with dehydrating. I think it is a lot quicker and easier. That is why I like it.

    You do need to clean the fruit or vegetable so there is no dirt on it before it goes into the dehydrator. After that you just dry the fruit and put it in the dehydrator.

    When you dehydrate apples or pears it takes a bit more work. You need to take the center with the seeds out. If you want it more fancy you can peel the, something I do not do. It is a matter of taste.

    When you have a lot of apples or pears you can use a special knife to cut the center out. The are also practical peeling devices to make the peeling quicker.

    Saving space by dehydrating vegetables.

    Except for the tomatoes we did not dehydrate a lot of vegetables yet, but our neighbouring friends do. They dehydrate practically all their surplus vegetables. The reason is that it saves a lot of space to store dehydrated vegetables instead of canned vegetables.

    Dehydrated fruit can be a healthy, heavenly candy.

    One of the best things of dehydrated fruit is, I think, that you can produce super nice healthy candies.

    We always like to have some snacks in between. And sure you can make a cake or some muesli bars for that purpose. But the thing is: they contain added sugar… The dried fruit or fruit leather does not. For me (being over 50…) this makes dehydrated fruit the perfect snack for in between.

    As already mentioned dehydrating fruit also keeps most of the vitamins in the fruit.

    Costs

    Yes, you do need to buy a dehydrator. When you buy the one we have it will cost you a bit over 100€. There are also some smaller dehydrators for a bit less as well.

    Other then buying the dehydrator the costs are very low. Most dehydrators are pretty efficient in electricity use. There is no significant difference in our electric bill when I have been dehydrating fruit even though the dehydrator runs a long time. I try to use the dehydrator overnight even saving more since the night price of the electricity we buy is lower than the day price.

    Once done and packed away, there are no extra costs involved.

    [button_simple link=”https://www.brouwland.com/nl/bier/?tt=25813_12_329799_Dehydrating&r=%2Fen%2Four-products%2Fkitchen-canning%2Fherb-fruit-drying” target=”_blank” background_color=”#ffffff” border_color=”#000″ text_color=”#000″ ]Click here to check out what a Dehydrator costs.[/button_simple]

    What can you dehydrate?

    You can basically dehydrate all fruit and vegetables but some things are nicer to dehydrate then others.

    On our farm we use different techniques for preserving: canning, steam juicing and dehydrating. Simply because some techniques work better for some things then other things. And sometimes we use different techniques for one thing to get a bigger variety.

    Hard fruit like apples and pears do not steam juice very well when they are not 100% ripe. Sometimes we harvest the fruit earlier because if we leave them hanging birds and fruit flies will consume them. Making the fruit to hart to steam juice. In that case we use dehydration to preserve the fruit.

    Softer fruit like plums, figgs and apricots as well as berries do very well in the steam juicer, but can also be dried in the dehydrator. We do both. The juice can be used for making syrup or jelly. The dehydrates fruit can be eaten as candies. The juice and the dried fruit can even be used in fruit sauces. Soft fruits can also be canned or made into jam. Something we also do.

    Persimmons a special fruit

    Preserving persimmons is a story on it’s own. You can make jam and wine, but none of the two have proved very satisfying for us. We have about 100 kg of persimmons every year from just three trees, which is a lot to process.

    I can sell some of the fruit on the market to people who do not have persimmon trees. But because almost everybody has them I never sell a lot. So I get stuck with the fruit.

    Steam juicing persimmons is impossible.

    Making jam from persimmons gives us an excellent jam. The only problem is that you need to make small quantities at a time. Somehow the jam does not set well when you have a big pot full of fruit pulp to process into jam. So we do make some Persimmon jam but not a lot. The jam is not suitable for selling since it oxidizes, showing a brown coloring in the jar.

    The best solution for processing persimmons we found is dehydrating the pulp into fruit leather. It makes a wonderful candy without any additives and without sugar. The good thing is that I can process all the fruit we have. It will also sell very well because it is absolutely delicious. It can be packaged in paper wraps or jars easily.

    Check our short slideshow on making persimmon fruit leather.

    So that’s it about dehydrating fruit and vegetables.

    I think dehydrating fruit and vegetables is very easy. It saves space, costs and time. For me it is a great way to make nice healthy snacks.

    And the fruit leather…. , is sooooo good.

    [button_simple link=”https://www.brouwland.com/nl/bier/?tt=25813_12_329799_Dehydrating&r=%2Fen%2Four-products%2Fkitchen-canning%2Fherb-fruit-drying” target=”_blank” background_color=”#1e73be” border_color=”#000″ text_color=”#000″ ]Click here to buy a Dehydrator[/button_simple]

    Dehydrating food

  • Why using a Steam Juicer is a good idea.

    Why using a Steam Juicer is a good idea.

    Do you have a lot of soft fruit at once in your Orchard? Do you find it hard to process it all at the same time? In that case using a steam juicer is a good idea.

    I struggled processing our fruit in the late spring. Hardest were the small plums which I had to de-stone before making jam. 70 kg of fruit to de-stone is very time consuming. It took all of my days to process them and there was still so much to do on the farm.

    Then my friend told me that she had bought a steam juicer. I had heard about using a steam juicer but had no idea how it worked. I bought one on her advice and I was surprised. It took me a lot less effort and time to process our fruit.

    This blog contains affiliate links. When you buy something trough these affiliate link you will help to keep us alive and be able to make more interesting blogs.

    The advantages of a steam juicer.

    For me there are a lot of advantages using a steam juicer.

    You can process a lot of fruit in a very short time span without a lot of labour. Up to 10 l of fruit at a time. You can use the whole soft fruit and do not need to take the stones out.

    The process of steam juicing is not complicated. There is not much that can go wrong.

    The fruit juice that comes out of the steam juicer is pasteurised. When poured in a clean sterilised bottle it will keep for a very long time.

    Steam juicing is very cost effective. Once the juice is made it does not need any extra electricity to keep it. It is ideal when you have a solar system. You can use gas to steam juice your fruit and then keep it forever without any extra energy input.

    You can use the juice as a basic ingredient for all sorts of tasty home mades. Like Jellie, syrup to make drinks, sauces and ice cream. We use it to enrich our kefir drink.

    In a steam juicer, you can also use over ripe fruit. So you will lose less fruit during the process.

    A disadvantage is that it does not work as well for hard fruit, like hard apples or pears. For us this is not really a problem because it is easy to dry apples and pears in our dehydrator. To know more about dehydrating click on this link: “The Advantages Of Dehydrating Fruit And Vegetables“.

    To go short, steam juicing is easy and it provides a quick way to process a lot of fruit. In our case it proved to be very effective to juice grapes, plums and berries.

    How does a Steam Juicer Work?

    Watch the short video to see what a steam juicer looks like and how it works.

    What do You Need for Steam Juicing?

    First of all you will need a good Steam Juicer. Mine is a 10 l one. So I can process enough fruit in one go. That saves me time. Through this link you will find the 10 l Steam Juicer we bought.

    The other thing you will need is bottles with a lid, washed and sterilised. For this I reuse beer bottles with a screw cap, rubber cap or a flip-top. You can also go fancy and use a special weck juice bottle.

    I reuse just any kind of bottle. I wash them well and sterilise them. How to do this? Click on the link and see my blog: Sterilising Bottles in the Oven.

    Summarising

    Steam juicers are very useful for processing large quantities of fruit into juice. In this way you will save time for doing other things on your farm.

    The juice can be stored for a long time and be used as a basic ingredient for lot of recipes.

    I hope you enjoyed my blog and have a great steam juicing time.

     

    Steam Juicer, Juicing