Making grape jelly

Fancy grape photography

Last week I harvested about ten pounds of grapes from the vines in our side yard (eight pounds of which were from a single super-productive vine).  We ate a few pounds, gave the shriveled or damaged ones to the chickens, and still had six pounds left to make into grape jelly.

Honestly, I've never really liked grape jelly that much, but I wasn't sure what else to do with grapes besides jelly, raisins, or wine, so we gave it a try.  I used the recipe from this awesome cookbook, which I highly recommend - it's also where I got my unbeatable recipe for pickled beets.

Essentially, we started by cleaning, sorting, and stemming all the grapes (Beatrice helped me with this part).  Then we added water and boiled them down to a mushy pulp.  Then we strained that mushy pulp overnight in little cheesecloth bags tied over a colander. 

In the morning, we had this:

Then we boiled that grape syrup with sugar and lemon juice until it thickened, canned it, and let it rest for about 24 hours to set.  Of course, I'm skipping the many, many arduous steps involved in sterilizing and sealing the jars.

It took about four hours overall, but most of that time was just waiting for 32 quarts of water to boil. 

Sterilizing the jars

In the end, it turned out pretty well.  I like the flavor more than commercial grape jelly, or maybe I'm telling myself that because I spent a total of two days working on it.  But it's tart, not too sweet, with a nice lemony aftertaste.  Unfortunately it didn't set up firmly enough. I was going to give some jars away to friends, but I think it's too runny to make a nice gift, so we'll just keep this batch at home.  All eight jars of it.

Runny jelly

Maybe next year we'll try raisins...

*A friend suggested I try adding chia seeds to firm it up - I think I'll try that tonight and see if it works.