Jelly Success!!!

Last year when we were receiving a lot of peaches in our Fair Shares CSA share I decided to make peach preserves.  It wasn't hard at all.  I followed the directions and they turned out fine.  This year we received grapes for a couple of weeks in a row.  We weren't eating them so jelly seemed like a good idea.  Like other projects I know nothing about I went out to the web and started reading everything I could.  It seemed the main idea I kept finding was to not play with the recipe.  Jelly needs a scientific balance of juice, sugar and pectin to set and changing the balance would end up with a runny mess.

The problem I had with that was the recipes seemed to have different ratios.  I knew I had been successful with canning tomatoes from the pick your own website, but the writer there was saying to add more pectin than the ball canning instructions, which seemed like a good source since they sell the ingredients.  I opted to follow the instructions that came with my pectin, which was a mistake.  I ended up with 8 jars of grape syrup.

Luckily the writer of the pick your own website was nice enough to include directions for how to fix jelly that doesn't set.  It wasn't too hard, and I now have tasty grape jelly.

You can follow all the directions on that site, but I wanted to share some thing I learned.  First of all, don't be afraid of having grapes, or worry about the skins.  To make jelly you just need the juice.  I put the whole grapes in my food processor and chopped them a little.  You then cook them on the stove to release the juices and strain it through a cloth.  All the seeds and skins stay in the cloth, and the heavy juice strains through.  I had 4 lbs of grapes and ended up with 5 cups of juice.   It was all very easy.

I made full sugar jelly this first time because the sugar free sounded harder to get to set.  Recognizing the difficulty I had, I 'm glad I did, but now I feel ready to try sugar free.

I highly recommend you give making grape jelly a try.  It feels great to know I could get it to work, and I know you will, too.  Any suggestions on what to make jelly out of next?