Almost Free Grape Jelly....

Goods & I live 8 houses from Lake St Clair, in Michigan...look at the beautiful view just a short skip and hop away. Our subdivision has a huge park running the whole width of the sub, along the lake. This is one of the paths to the lake.....Specifically, look to the right of the photo....what do you see????

Confused???? How about a closer look.....

See - FREE GRAPES! And what do you think the busiest laid off vegan is going to do with them?????? Yeap - I made grape jelly. I am a virgin grape jelly maker, so what better opportunity was there to make grape jelly with FREE GRAPES???? Well there was none - so here we go!

First of course, I washed the grapes. I wash all my veggies and fruit with a tad of Method Dish Detergent.

So I got my Ball Blue Canning Book out - I really didn't care for their "grape prep" instructions so I decided to do a little web browsing and I came up with using my juicer instead of the suggested "mash the grapes with your feet" method (not really but you get the gist). I set up outside so I wouldn't make a mess in the kitchen- yeah right, like that didn't happen later in the process. Here is my set up - Lily is all ready.....

A closer look WITHOUT Lily......

Here is what the remnants look like after they went thru the juicer....Closer look.......

Do you see what I see???? I see a lot of waste - so I put the pulp thru again....and got extra juice. Can't waste free grapes right???

A side note - doing this outside was perfect - the grape seeds could fly around where they pleased - not that it pleased Lily, one actually hit her.

Goods & I picked 6 lbs of grapes. That equaled 14 cups of usable purple grapes. The 14 cups of grapes juiced into 6 cups of grape juice - free grape juice that is....and all I needed was 5 cups of juice for the recipe in Ball Blue book.

In the Ball Blue book instructions, it stated to do some sort of straining with cheese cloth. Well I was out of cheese cloth (because we are addicted to this cheese) - so I used a fine colander strainer. Well that wasn't going to do it for me. The straining part was to take the "fibers" out of the jelly....since I wasn't too concerned about how purrtee the jelly was - I just skipped the straining.

The Ball Blue instructions also said to let the juice stand for 12-24 hours to prevent formation of tartrate crystals in the jelly. Guess what??? I didn't care - I don't know what tartrate crystals are and anyway - I always had a thing for crystals...really any sparkly thing - oh, so I skipped the "juice standing" part. I know REBEL!

So - I mixed 5 cups of grape juice with 1 package of powdered pectin...boil over high heat... SEEEE.....

After it came to a boil - add 6 cups of sugar (bargain sugar at that) - stir until dissolved...looks a little more purpley now....

Return to rolling boil....and boil hard 1 minute stirring constantly. (A side note: make sure you use a big enough pot! Otherwise you have a sticky mess to clean up on your stove....learn by my mistakes please). Skim any foam off if necessary. So then I did the boil-water canning method. 10 mins for pints / 5 mins for half pints.

I yielded - 3 pints and 2 half pints ( 4 pints total - my middle name is Einstein)

No, the jelly isn't clear, no the jelly isn't bright purple like you buy from the store....it isn't going to win a blue ribbon at the state fair for it's looks....but the taste, well as Goods put it..."it taste like grape jelly"! SCORE!

As Goods tasted more of it...the more he appreciated it. He really like the "natural" sweetness of it...yeah, real sugar instead of the high fructose corn syrup that store bought jelly has in it.

I'm going to make more, next time I'm going to purchase some real concord grapes and do a "half free/half bought" grape mixture...I want to see if it makes the jelly more grapey...not that it really needs it.

Finally, in conclusion - store bought grape jelly is for the birds. But the real test, as Goods put it "we will see how it taste in a peanut butter samwich"....stay tuned.