We have a couple used juicers we picked up at garage sales, and which we have never used. Would those work the same as your food mill, or do juicers remove too much pulp? Hopefully we will have lots of various currants ripe in another year or two.
Before I discovered food mills I would force the pulp through an ordinary sieve. Messy and cumbersome, but doable. Food mills are still pretty messy, but much, much nicer to use. I have a couple I picked up at sales for a few bucks, and prefer the one with a scraper on the outside (bottom) of the screen. Mine is a lot like this:
Ours are motorized with a screen in them and spin centrifugally, so they would get the seeds and peels. The question would be if they leave any pulp or only end up with juice.
That’s very similar to what I do except I’ve been picking out the stems and then using an immersion blender in the pot.
It looks like there are some seeds in the jam, I don’t mind them.
I have a masticating juicer and some type of food mill attachments for the kitchenaid mixer, I may try one of those one of these times with the stems on.
Is the equal measure sugar by volume or weight? I prefer measuring things by weight.
If you’re used to using a scale (or, in my case, a beam balance) it’s much faster, more reliable, and consistent. I’ve always worked in traditional US measurements (pounds/ounces) which takes a little getting used to if you add on instead of emptying the scoop each time, but with metric (or a scale you can zero with a button) you can just fly.
I can see the consistency issue, as different grinds of sugar or salt have different density… Honestly I often dont even use measuring cups when I make stuff tho, my wife hates it but my cookies have a pinch of salt, a splash of vanilla, etc!
I do a lot of that too when I’m cooking supper or such, but if quantities get scaled up very much I like my scale.
Full disclosure: for jams I just use cups- really easy to adjust if the sugars a bit off. But for baking I use the scale almost exclusively. And I worked for a long time as a commercial baker, where on a given day one formula or another might call for anything from a half ounce to two pounds of salt. But that’s a whole ’ nother story!
When going by weight I don’t need to dirty additional spoons and cups, don’t have to clean anything between measurements, don’t have to try and scrape honey/oil/butter out of the measuring device.
Its repeatable, doesn’t matter if salt is kosher (or what brand). Don’t have to guess at what type the recipe writer intended. Don’t have to worry about the different types of gallons or ounces that have the same name but different volumes.
Is flour supposed to be sifted then measured, or measured then sifted? Scooped and swept, or poured into the cup? With weighing it doesn’t matter the order.
I also can take the shortcut and weigh the berries before they are cooked and molten hot. Then I don’t have to touch them again to determine how much sugar to use, let alone dirty some more stuff.
It is soooo good!