Grape Jelly
Ingredient ratio:1 cup grape juice, strained
1.75 cups sugar
1/4 package liquid pectin
Note that it isn't recommended that you crank up a huge vat of hot water just to make one and a half jars of jelly. This is a ratio of ingredients so that you can use any amount you have and still make a successful jelly. I followed the instructions for liquid pectin because it's what the Ball book of canning calls for. I cannot say with any expertise what the ratios would be if using dried pectin or home made.
1. Put your grape juice in a pot on the stove and crank up the stove to high. Stir the sugar into the fruit and bring it to a roiling boil.
2. Add the correct amount of liquid pectin, stirring it in quickly.
3. Boil for exactly one minute. I'm lame and don't have a kitchen timer so I watch the clock which is inexact.
4. Skim foam off. The foam won't hurt anything. It will make your jelly UNSIGHTLY, is all.
5. Ladle jelly into hot jars.
6. Leaving 1/4" headroom, cap the jars.
7. Process in a boiling water bath canner for 5 minutes.
1. Put your grape juice in a pot on the stove and crank up the stove to high. Stir the sugar into the fruit and bring it to a roiling boil.
2. Add the correct amount of liquid pectin, stirring it in quickly.
3. Boil for exactly one minute. I'm lame and don't have a kitchen timer so I watch the clock which is inexact.
4. Skim foam off. The foam won't hurt anything. It will make your jelly UNSIGHTLY, is all.
5. Ladle jelly into hot jars.
6. Leaving 1/4" headroom, cap the jars.
7. Process in a boiling water bath canner for 5 minutes.
Grape jelly is not a childhood memory of mine. Grape jelly was for those kids who got white bread and Skippy peanut butter. In my house we had honey, jam, or fruit butters with our peanut butter sandwiches. I never once felt my life was worse off for the absence of jelly in my life.
I don't think I ever experienced it until I was twenty two years old. The memory of that oozing squishy gluey "bread" confection is just as vivid to me today as the day I actually experienced it. A peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on gluey bread is not the kind of food one can take lying down, partly because this might lead to suffocation, and partly because one must have the senses wide open and alert to appreciate it.
This type of sandwich must be eaten with some kind of beverage such as water or milk lest your throat glues itself shutin protest while you're trying to make sense of the cement like substance that saliva reduces it to. There was a moment for me, that first time, when I couldn't decide if this jelly sandwich was so strange it was charming, like an exotic tropical dessert, or if it was going to kill me once it hit my intestines and was therefore not charming at all.
In the end I decided that my life would be pretty good if I never ate a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich again.
Then one day, several years later, I got a jar of my cousin Christa's grape jelly made from grapes growing wild in her yard all the way over in Wisconsin. It was a lovely blushed pink color and smelled heavenly. I ate some on toasted wheat bread with butter and experienced something so wholly unlike my previous jelly experience...it was beautiful, flavorful, and without the peanut butter to smother it, it was marvellously cool to the tongue and yet also like warm sunshine spread across a field of wheat.
Ever since then I have courted the idea of begging my cousin for more of her jelly.
When I got free grapes from my friend Laurie I seized the opportunity to make some of my own. Concords are the classic grape for that purple grape juice flavor. I figured it must be perfect for jelly. I could serve it up in tiny jars and pretend to be eating in a cafe, always an ambition of mine.
It took me nearly a week to prepare the juice for it which consists of cleaning and de-stemming the grapes, mashing them with a masher in a big pot, boiling them for a few minutes, and then straining them. Straining them again. Then, against the sage advice of Internet friends who know about things like this, straining them once again because I don't want to have my first grape jelly be ugly.
Once the juice was strained sufficiently I refrigerated it because having five jobs can really get in the way of making jellies*. On Saturday I made the jelly. I did set aside some fragrant fine pulp for making into a jam/jelly hybrid since I hated wasting perfectly good fruit pulp. I used pectin because even though Concords are one of the few grapes that have a decent amount of pectin I didn't want to take chances. In case you decide to make some of your own, note that I'm very happy I used added pectin!
*It will reduce down to three jobs soon enough. Two of them are freelance. Then it will be just two jobs because one of them is temporary.
I don't think I ever experienced it until I was twenty two years old. The memory of that oozing squishy gluey "bread" confection is just as vivid to me today as the day I actually experienced it. A peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on gluey bread is not the kind of food one can take lying down, partly because this might lead to suffocation, and partly because one must have the senses wide open and alert to appreciate it.
This type of sandwich must be eaten with some kind of beverage such as water or milk lest your throat glues itself shut
In the end I decided that my life would be pretty good if I never ate a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich again.
Then one day, several years later, I got a jar of my cousin Christa's grape jelly made from grapes growing wild in her yard all the way over in Wisconsin. It was a lovely blushed pink color and smelled heavenly. I ate some on toasted wheat bread with butter and experienced something so wholly unlike my previous jelly experience...it was beautiful, flavorful, and without the peanut butter to smother it, it was marvellously cool to the tongue and yet also like warm sunshine spread across a field of wheat.
Ever since then I have courted the idea of begging my cousin for more of her jelly.
When I got free grapes from my friend Laurie I seized the opportunity to make some of my own. Concords are the classic grape for that purple grape juice flavor. I figured it must be perfect for jelly. I could serve it up in tiny jars and pretend to be eating in a cafe, always an ambition of mine.
It took me nearly a week to prepare the juice for it which consists of cleaning and de-stemming the grapes, mashing them with a masher in a big pot, boiling them for a few minutes, and then straining them. Straining them again. Then, against the sage advice of Internet friends who know about things like this, straining them once again because I don't want to have my first grape jelly be ugly.
Once the juice was strained sufficiently I refrigerated it because having five jobs can really get in the way of making jellies*. On Saturday I made the jelly. I did set aside some fragrant fine pulp for making into a jam/jelly hybrid since I hated wasting perfectly good fruit pulp. I used pectin because even though Concords are one of the few grapes that have a decent amount of pectin I didn't want to take chances. In case you decide to make some of your own, note that I'm very happy I used added pectin!
*It will reduce down to three jobs soon enough. Two of them are freelance. Then it will be just two jobs because one of them is temporary.
Labels: food preserving, grape jelly