Canning Orange Juice

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There's an orchard near our house that sells oranges and grapefruits for right around twenty cents per pound.  We've learned in the short time we've lived here that canning isn't something a lot of people do in a climate where there's something in season just about all the time.  

But it's in our blood, and we can't help but imagine how wonderful it would be to have our own orange and grapefruit juice all year long, so we buy a lot of oranges at a time and put our half gallon jars to good use.

I did a Google search to find out what I needed to know about canning orange juice.  Here is what I learned, from Google and from processing my own juice:

• Don't use a regular juicer.  The membranes between orange sections, and the white stuff between the peel and the fruity part will turn bitter after the juice is canned.
• Use a citrus juicer.  {See above.}
• One blogger recommended cooking the juice first, and then putting hot juice in hot jars for processing in a water bath.  I put cold juice into cold jars, which I then put into cold water.  I brought it to a low boil for twenty minutes (fifteen minutes would work for quart size and smaller), and took them out.  All my  jars have sealed so far.
• There's no need for sugar, but add some if your oranges are a little on the tart side, or if you like it extra sweet.  The juice we taste tested after canning was still perfectly sweet.
• Unlike the pulp in home canned grape and apple juice, the pulp in the orange juice remains sweet after it's canned.  In the above photo, the two jars on the left show what the juice looks like when it first comes out of the water bath (the pulp separates).  The jar to the right shows how it looks with the juice shaken so that the pulp is mixed with the rest of the juice again.
• I haven't tried making grapefruit juice yet, but by all accounts, the process will be the same.