Grape Jelly

When my neighbors cut down the Concord Grape Vine that bordered my yard, I thought I was out of luck for grapes this year. Fortunately however, the grapes left on the dead vine branches ripened in the sun anyway. Most of the grapes weren't as plump as normal grapes would be, but they were the right color, and juicy. I wasn't sure about eating them straight out, so I figured I'd make either wine or jelly. Wine was a bit over my skill level for now, so I settled on grape jelly.

This is the harvest a few weeks ago, when I pulled all the grapes from the vine. I just keep getting more cucumbers!

Here's a better close up of the grapes:

Concord grapes aren't like "normal" grapes you'd get at the grocery store at all. They have a very thick skin that slips off easily. The taste is strong too, and despite a kind of weird texture, they can be an addictive snack. I forgot to take a picture of the next step (boiling down the grapes), so you'll just have to imagine these beauties in a pot with about 2 cups of water. After boiling the grapes, I drained them with cheesecloth and left the juices sit overnight (because one recipe said this would eliminate "crystallization" whatever that is).

While I planned on making jelly last weekend, my cousin from Buffalo visited so we biked around the city and took a boat trip along the Charles River, ate Ethiopian and Afghani food, and basically didn't do much more. So my juice sat for about a week before I got a chance to make my jelly.

I didn't really have a great recipe, and I had trouble deciding which online recipe to use. Some didn't use pectin, others were freezer jelly recipes, many used a thermometer, and the pectin I bought didn't have a recipe for grape jelly either, so I kind of improvised using other recipes as a baseline.


I put in 4 cups of grape juice, 5 cups of sugar (most recipes called for 7!) and after they boiled together added 1/2 packet of pectin. I initially forgot to scoop off the foam, but quickly figured out that I needed to. This did cause a problem for some of my jars though, so there may be a few jars of jelly with globs in them.


After a I scraped off the remaining
foam, I processed the jelly in a water bath for 10 minutes (looking at other jelly recipes for direction here). When I pulled them out they began popping immediately.



Then, because I had some time on my hands, I decided to make labels for my jelly and pickle jars. I used the homemade paper I made a few weeks ago and pasted the labels onto the jars with a glue made from flour and water.

Here are the results :)



I plan to either give some of the jelly away as presents for Christmas or take some to the Laurel Street Trading Post in a few weeks.

Gerd loves his pickles and says they remind him of his grandmother ("Granny"). Since we used her recipe I figured I would give credit where credit was due.