Friday, August 22, 2008

"wild" grape jelly

This is my 49th post. Should I do something special for the 50th, or is that right reserved for the 100th?

Anyway. The grapes that shadow our back porch bloomed and then produced like crazy this year. Turns out we have green seedless grapes, not at all table grapes but deliciously flavourful and very productive.

I thought I'd toss out some photos of the grapes and the jelly that fishy and I (though mostly fishy) made. We used a recipe from the Internets: Wild Grape Jelly. fishy did some modifications for the second batch, with more juice and less sugar, and it turned out better. We have no idea how many pounds of grapes we used. More than three for sure. We made two batches of jelly and still had juice left over. It was quite simple, but very time consuming, for the de-stemming of the grapes, the washing, and the crushing. Which we did with our bare hands. After the crushing, we got something that looked like this:


It was delicious, but a little painfully sour. We strained (not overnight) and ended up with this crazy, cloudy, grey-green juice. Something like I imagine the Limpopo River looking like. It tasted fine though. We added food colouring (doing it again, I don't think I would -- I'd like to see if the jelly clarifies a little and looks a little more appealing) and pectin, and away we went. Well, fishy. I was making cornbread and marinating tofu. So, fishy did all the actual canning bits. This is what we ended up with:


It's lovely. The first batch is a little sweet, but the second is just about perfect. Looking forward to testing it with cheese. The first batch will have to be for toast and dessert, I think.

2 comments:

Kathleen said...

mmmm!! looks so good, Kiirstin!

Unknown said...

It was delicious, too! I think it would be good on toast, but we have managed to eat most of it with crackers and cheese, which is also a good combination.