Tuesday, 18 September 2012
making grape jelly (or not), step one: make juice
We made the most spectacular green grape juice a few weeks ago and foolishly didn’t take pictures. After picking blue grapes, we remedied the situation and took photos as we started to make blue grape jelly.
Well, we were GOING to make jelly… we thought that the “Not Far From the Tree” blue grapes would make great jelly.
As we washed and pulled grapes off their stems, we talked about pectin. Should we add it? Should we hope it would work without? Should we just add lemon juice? Or maybe a few cranberries because they have natural pectin?
We decided to mull it over.
And then we began step one of jelly making: boiling the grapes to make juice.
We put the washed grapes into a big pot and just covered them with water. Then we brought them to a boil, immediately turned down the heat and simmered them for about ten minutes.
The aroma! In spite of the fact that the grapes hadn’t begun to ferment, it was intoxicating. No wonder people make grape jelly! And jam… and wine….
Forget making cookies just before having an open house to sell it. Have grapes simmering on the stove!
After simmering, we turned the heat off and used a potato masher to break the grapes up a little more. Then we took the pot off the stove and let the grapes cool a little more before starting to ladle them into the food mill to separate the skins and seeds.
We used the medium holes on the food mill – we wanted to leave some of the solids in the juice.
We tasted the juice before putting it into a pillow case to strain for jelly making. It was delicious!
We tasted a little more. It was even more delicious than we had first thought!
We couldn’t stop. It was too good. It was sweet from the grapes but had a slight tartness and wildness from the pulp that remained.
The juice was so delicious that we decided we’d make jelly out of just one cup of the juice, pouring it into a little muslin bag. (Why do we even have a bag like that, I wonder?) We left the bag hanging overnight. The next morning, after sieving out the ecstatic fruitflies (and a few fruitflies who had died happily) we tasted the juice.
Hey! It’s Concord grape juice! It tasted JUST like Welch’s grape juice. Ewwwww! I loathe Welch’s Concord grape juice. It’s too sweet. We nixed jelly making for now (who wants Concord grape jelly??) and threw the rest of the strained juice back into the jug of unstrained delicious juice in the fridge. Maybe if I pick more green grapes, we’ll make green grape jelly.
Oh yes. Before I forget: to pectin or not to pectin. We’ll decide later. After we have another glass of juice. 
Not Far From the Tree
“Not Far From the Tree” is a Toronto organization that includes a residential fruit-picking program to pick fruit (with permission, of course) that would otherwise go to waste.
There are lots and lots of fruit trees and vines in Toronto!! Bearing fruit that is eaten by birds, squirrels and raccoons. If you have such a thing in your garden and would like the animals to share the fruit with people, please do contact “Not Far From the Tree”. They will send a team of pickers to clean up your yard of fallen fruit and pick the good fruit that is still in the tree. The harvested fruit is divided evenly into 3 portions: one third going to the tree owners, one third going to the volunteer pickers and the final third going to food banks, shelters, and community kitchens.
For more information about NFFtT and how you can donate your time and/or share your fruit, please go to
We had some for breakfast this morning.
It was as delicious as ever
… 
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Sounds like the freshly prepared juice was better than cookies…or wine…nah, couldn’t be that good
If there is any juice left you might make jelly using the concord tasting stuff with some cranberries and orange peel added and the juice simmered some more. That would add some tang and offset the sweetness, plus add lovely flavors. Easy for me to say. We used to make jelly and jam when I was little and I made some in my 20s and 30s but these days it seems like too much work. Would rather bake bread with that time, and make fresh tomato sauce with the garden tomatoes. Maybe its because I don’t use a lot of jam or jelly, but do use lots of bread and pasta sauce.
If you do make the jelly, do post about it, OK?
It seems more and more unlikely that we’ll make grape jelly, Elle, even though that’s a good idea to add cranberries and/or orange peel. But the unstrained juice is just too good to waste on a jelly making experiment. I’m thinking that if I get hold of some crabapples, THEN I’ll try making jelly. Or maybe I’ll attempt to make chilli jelly. Or wine jelly… if we don’t drink all the wine first, that is.
-Elizabeth