This is a lifetime piece of kitchen equipment, made in Finland of quality stainless steel. With almost no mess or work, it turns quantities of fresh fruit into clear, sterile, hot juice which you can then pipe directly into Mason jars, where it will self seal with no further processing.

Picture a multi-layer double-boiler sort of arrangement, the size of a big soup pot. All stacked up, it’s 16" high, and about 12" across. The lowest pan gets water in it, to boil for the steam. The topmost pan is a 10.5 quart colander basket, where you put the fruit; this has a lid. The middle pan looks like an angel-food-cake pan, with a conical hole in the center. This is where the juice collects.

In a brilliant move, they attached a hose to the lower part of the juice-collector pan. This has a spring clamp to close it off, which clamp also serves as a hook, to park it on one of the side handles when not in use.

This juicer is especially useful when you have a sudden supply of fruit, and don’t want to spend days making jelly or heating up your kitchen. Once the juice is canned, it will keep for years, and can be made into jelly at any future time. The fruit needs hardly any prepping: whole cherries, grapes, blackberries, quartered apples or nectarines. I’ve stacked fresh rhubarb in vertically, yielding something akin to lemon juice. When you’ve simmered the water for an hour or two, you end up with about five quarts of juice and, in the top basket, some pulpy mush for compost (or you can stop after about 2 quarts, like I did with nectarines, and have mush still useable in a cobbler). The tastiest juice I ever made was when I got a case of Bing cherry “seconds”: a tiny jar of the juice was like nectar to drink straight.

The 48-page booklet that comes with it tells how you can use it to cook meat, vegetables and anything else you might want to steam. I once easily made steamed broccoli for 40 people.

The Lehman’s catalogue sells this one for about $200, and a somewhat smaller Chinese version for $80. I got my Finnish one on Craigslist second hand. Amazon has it, too. — Lynn Nadeau

Norpro Stainless Steamer Juicer $150