Hows my little Jelly Maker?

What's the difference between Jelly and Jam?
The answer to that pickup line/joke is being withheld for the sake of the innocent children (and my mother).

The real difference is jelly is made with juice, jam with chunks.

Laura's parents make some really good Jam and its always piqued a small interest in me to me to see how its done, I've never mentioned it before because they always pick their own wild fruit and I have absolutely no interest in being hunched over while picking for more than 15 minutes. So I decided to take a shot in the dark...one of the best ways to learn...right?

Laura and I harvested somewhere around 30 pounds of Vanessa grapes from work for this jelly. I've now realized that de-stemming grapes is a huge pain and appreciate our machine that does it for us at work. After that we shoved all the berries through our food mill to de-skin and seed them. The food mill attachment for our mixer is fantastic, still.

Grape skin food mill terd.

The next step is boiling, after the juice comes to a boil add you sugar and pectin and boil again for 1 minute.

This step sounds simple but the naturalist in me wanted to find a way around using sugar and pectin. Which is a whole other blog, but since I've got time, I'll cut it short and put it in this one.

Pectin I thought was some sort of crazy food chemical found accidentally while doing research on coal...or something. Turns out it's a natural thing found in and derived from apples. Not so bad I thought, so Pectin became OK. If you're asking what is pectin, it's a substance used to thicken things like Jellys and Jams. It naturally occurs in all sorts of fruits.

Fun fact about Pectin, its advised all over to avoid making large batches of things as it wont set properly and you will have liquidy jelly. So we split our batch up into the sizes recommended by this handy website.

I did hear about another thing that could be used as an alternative to it along the way via Laura's brother, chia seeds! As in Cha-Cha-Cha-Chia! WebMD says "Chia seeds are a concentrated food containing healthy omega-3 fatty acids, carbohydrates, protein, fiber, antioxidants, and calcium" when you mix them into water they form a gel, or a jel-ly is what I interpreted that as.

Lastly I thought I should try to utilize some of the benefits of local honey, instead of cane sugar.

Back to the Jelly, of course since we had no idea how much pectin anything took I initially bought half of what I needed so it forced me to attempt the Chia seed jelly method, that I had previously chickened out from attempting.

So onto batch 3 armed with the two-ish remaining tablespoons of pectin and a about eight of Chia seeds we set to work. I did everything as usual, while ignoring the recommendations from the internet about adding water to the chia seeds first (thinking I was dropping them into liquid). We also ran out of honey so Laura also bought some sugar, and we had a surplus of Jalapenos from the garden, so I added a heaping pureed pile of them to the batch for good measure. Then processed as usual.

A couple of chili peppers mixed in just to make sure it got spicy.

So after your one minute boiling of everything I found this super useful trick in our new Preservation Kitchen book using a chilled plate to test consistency. It's super easy, put a couple of plates in the freezer when you start your process, and after your boil dribble some of your hot liquid onto your cold plate wait about 20 seconds for it to cool and spoon it back up, if it is your desired consistency you may proceed, if not add more pectin and boil again for another minute. This is a great test because otherwise you're relying completely on your recipe and we all know how that can often be a disaster.

Scraping to check consistancy...pretty good!

The final result?

Mixed. Batch #1 was the best consistency and Batch #3 the worst, kinda. Batch #2 although there was more pectin in it was a bit runnier, I blame this on the only remaining box in our store being different and more lame.

I was super nervous about the Jalapeno batch because all of the Chia seeds separated and floated to the top half of the jars, which made me think the batch was a failure. So this morning I set to unlock the truth. Turns out the jelly is indeed a bit thin but it still sticks to a knife and easily spreads! and the taste was phenomenal! Just enough jalapeno to give it a nice twist and just enough heat on the finish to surprise you but not enough to make you think about reaching for a glass of milk.

I'm excited. I learned a good amount and am excited to try making more next year.

Unfortunately due to a jar and pectin shortage we only made half of the juice into jelly, lucky for me I had some montrachet yeast hanging around and decided on making a gallon of wine with the rest of it...why not!?