Autumn Jellies

Make hay while the sun shines , or in our case jelly. Its time to get out there and pick whatever berries  and fruit you can before the rain destroys them, and turn them into gorgeous jewel coloured homemade jellies. Last week we spent Friday morning picking our way along the neighbour’s hedge and ended up making Wild Crabapple Jelly, Wild Damson Jelly and a Hedgerow Jelly.Yumm!

The basic jelly recipe is fairly straightforward.

Apple Jelly

Fill a pot 3/4 full of  apples cut into quarter(dont peel or core them)

Add enough water to just cover the apples

cook for about 45 minutes until the apples have gone to mush

put in a jelly bag and leave to drain above a bowl for at least an hour if not overnight

measure the resulting  juice and put it back into a pot with 1 pound of sugar for every pint of juice. (The juice will be cloudy but adding the sugar and heating will clear it)

Cook up until it reaches setting point ( see rhubarb jam recipe) and skim off any sugar scum floating on top.

pour jelly into pots and lid. You can add a few cloves to each pot  or  a pinch of cinnamon .

Buy a jelly bag, They are fairly inexpensive and give a  clearer jelly and are much handier than  faffing around with sheets and pillowcases which so many people seem to do.

Okay now you have the basic recipe .  The reason we use apple jelly as the basic recipe is because apples have a great deal of natural pectin and when you mix them up with other berries the apples pectin makes up for the lack in other berries (blackberries and elder berries especially). Thus you dont need to use jam sugar or any other artificial setting agent.

The main apples we use are cooking apples ( mostly bramley seedling). When we can get them we use windfalls from any apples  both cookers and eaters . The smaller and greener the better for the most  pectin. Each variety of apple produces a different flavoured jelly and some colour variation . When making crabapple jelly we  add some cooking apples to the pot of crabapples as we find pure crabapple jelly a bit too sour for most tastes.

So just adapt the basic apple recipe for other jellies

Damson Jelly

recipe as above but 1/2 damson 1/2 apple

Hedgerow Jelly

We found some early elderberries and added some haws ,blackberries crabs and damsons  to the pot . An equal amount of windfall apples was then added and then the whole lot cooked up as above.

Blackberry Jelly or Elderberry Jelly are made the same as Damson.

For Hawthorn, Rosehip and Rowanberry Jelly use about 1/3 berries to apples.