I had so much fun making grape jelly last week. A coworker left a giant bowl of grapes from her garden in the staff room and, after all the teachers had munched their fill, I offered (eagerly!) to take the rest home. Sticking to my philosophy of only canning free fruit, I’ve never had any grapes to play with before and was excited to try. To be honest, I’m a little scared of jellies. I’ve only ever made an apple spice jelly which included a long process (and me trying to sew my own jelly bag.) Oof. But! This was so easy! And the product was so absolutely delicious. I used this recipe, substituting the nameless grapes I was gifted. We rinsed the whole batch in a large colander and happily found that the grapes fell easily from the stems. (We found that we didn’t even need to remove all of the stems. These fell away easily during cooking and were grabbed by the food mill.) Immediately after cooking, I ran the grape mixture through the medium disc on my food mill. I finished by canning in my trusty steam oven on 212F and full steam for ten minutes.
After measuring out for the recipe, I had extra pulp and liquid. Rather than do the scale up math (did I mention this was a late night canning project?), I froze the rest of the juice. I’m hoping to make a fancy non-alcoholic drink for Thanksgiving. We’ll see how that goes!
Check out my recent write up of my favorite wheat bread recipe here. Pairs well with jam, of course!
Small Potatoes 