Juicing Cane

At Camp Ramshackle, the plants that thrive are the ones that don’t require too much attention. Our sugar cane, started as a six inch start, is case and point. I harvested a stalk to add to lemonade.

I first removed the thick tough skin.
Once the skin was peeled, I sliced the cane stalks in half.

Resident child labor juiced the stalks. Despite the mechanical help of the juicer it was an arduous task.

Our yield was meager at best. We savored a few drops & dumped our juiced cane into our lemonade. The juicing of the lemons went much more smoothly.

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12 Comments

  1. Huh, that doesn’t look right. I’ve watched sugar rollers squash cane and juice just pours out. Not sure what sort of juicer set-up you have but you should try a twin-gear. I’d think you’d get better results.

  2. Wow. No wonder sugar production and slavery were so closely intertwined back in the day. I’d figured it had to do with growing the cane, but now I realize it was probably also in the processing. Imagine trying to do that without industrial equipment.

  3. It seems that you could soak the leavings of the juicer to extract more sugar. Maybe not. When we were children, we always got a cane to chew on. Daddy peeled each of us a section, leaving enough skin to hold our portion. We chewed on it until we tired of our piece of cane. I think our chickens got the rest. Maybe I will try to find a cane at our farmer’s market just for the memories.

  4. I think my extraction techniques could be improved. The low yield was definitely a user generated error. I did some quick research prior to juicing the cane. Like The Lazy Geographer says, some of the extraction techniques bend & roll the cane with juice pouring out see this photo. Youtube has some great videos of cane presses on the streets of India (which I was unable to post in the comments-a quick search will show many).

    Still very labor intensive but with a greater yield.

    Now there are also very industrial juicing machines that use the roll and press process. I’ll give the juicing another go in the future & try the roll and press technique.

  5. I’ve seen people juicing fresh sugar cane at markets and they seem to get a good yield – just the other day we were wondering just where you get those juicers from – thought doing it in our home one might be too much for it.

  6. I used to drink sugar cane water from street vendors all the time when I lived in Vietnam! Perfect on a hot day in a sub tropical climate. They used something that was like a motorized mangle that just took the stalk and squeezed all the juice out. They’d put a length of about 12-18 inches through a few times, and that made about a perfect drink-sized amount with some ice. Mm, brings back fond memories..

  7. This would grow great here in Florida. I wouldn’t mind the process especially if trying to reduce sugar intake. If I had to do that every time I wanted lemonade, we’d probably drink a lot more water 🙂

  8. I’ve been making cane juice from the sugarcane that previous owners planted in our backyard and since I don’t have a mechanical juicer, I’ve been using a metal orange-squeezer like you can buy in Mexico, and I feel like I can get as much as in your photo out of one or two 6 inch pieces. The folks who planted it banged the juice out with a mallet. I don’t know if you even need to peel or cut it if you use that method so that would save a ton of labor.

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