When I was a comparative slip of a lass, I attended high school in Plant City, Florida. Plant City was famed for being the "winter strawberry capital of the world," and every year they hold a huge festival with concerts and rides and berries upon berries. As a member of the marching band, it was required that I put in some number of hours manning the strawberry pie booth.
I don't like strawberries. I don't like the seeds, I don't like the squish. I will eat artificially strawberry flavored whatever, but real ones? No.
Couple this with the fact that I was an only child, in a household of 3, where if I saw fruit at all, it came out of a can, and I was completely bewildered why anyone would buy an entire flat of strawberries at one go.
I have concluded they all must have been making jelly.
Not Your Average Blogger's mom made fabulous jelly. We finished the last jar of it a little while back. Sad.
So I figured I might as well take a stab at carrying on the tradition, right? I checked out six books from the library. I read everything I could get my hands on. I found out jam is easy, jelly is hard. But ... well. Seeds. Squish. Jelly it must be.
Well. Now I know why I like jelly. It is so far removed from actual fruit as to be almost completely unrelated.
After doing my homework, and thanks to Mom and Dad, I got all kinds of nifty jelly-making apparatus for my birthday. I got a canner bath and rack. I got a jar gripper and a lid magnet and some other items. I got another book.
I found a recipe in one of the library books. It was very thorough and incredibly detailed and seemed reasonably idiot-proof. So I went with that.
First, it told me to get 5 quarts of strawberries. Except strawberries are sold in pounds. So that was interesting.
Hulled and chopped.
Mashed.
Then the recipe said to heat them in an 8-qt pan with a cup of water. Well, I had a 6-quart and a 12-quart. I went with the smaller.
When the berries finally did boil, they made a lot of foam. That needs to be skimmed off.
Ew.
Then it said to strain through a seive to get juice from pulp. Large and small. The problem is, the small gunks up the sieve. So I had to dump in little amounts and run through the sieve, then rinse out the sieve and start over. It took five or six cycles to run through the whole potful.
Once the big hunks are done, the juice needs to be strained through cloth. Twice. And more scum skimmed off. And again, the pulp clogs up the process. I used two of three juice bags to get through all the juice, and even doing it that way I had to wiggle the bags around to get to unclogged pieces of cloth.
It said that for truly clear and gorgeous jelly, you should strain it through a coffee filter. Know what? Screw that. I dropped in a quarter cup and watched it for five minutes and barely any went through.
So after two strains, I put it in a big bowl and refrigerated overnight, to allow sediment to settle. Next morning I measured out the amount I needed.
And strained it one more time. Now, the recipe I was looking at wanted 4 cups of juice and 7 cups of sugar. It also called for two packets of liquid pectin. Well, I had powdered. So I blew off the original recipe and looked at the recipe in the pectin box. 3-3/4 c juice, 4 cups sugar. Sold!
Juice.
While all this jelly measuring and straining and sugar measuring is going on, you are also supposed to be sterilizing the jars and lids. (I got a shmancy lid holder -- you can see it off to the right in the photo above.)
I had a problem with the jars. I put them in the rack and lowered the rack into the water, and -- duh, the empty jars all immediately tipped over and fell out and rolled around. Harumph. While I was bringing the juice to its first boil, I fished all the jars out.
Pectin.
Boil, stirring constantly. It poofs up right damn quick, so you have to have the sugar RIGHT THERE and be stirring the whole time.
ADD LOTS OF SUGAR.
Stir til sugar dissolves and boil again. It looks virtually the same as the first boil.
Then there is more scum to skim off.
Once everything is all hot and bothered, the jars are out and the jelly is ready, ladle into jars.
Add lids. (Side note. There are five small cans of Dr. Pepper in this shot. They have been in my house for a week. I am doing quite well getting that monkey off my back, thanks to the wonders of Starbucks and Chik-Fil-A iced tea. Now, on with the show.)
Screw on tops. Tightly.
Put in boiling water bath for 5 minutes. I don't know if I was more careful, or having the jars full helped, but none fell over that time.
Take out, let cool.
Five of my six jars sealed correctly, which makes me happy. Now I am waiting to see if this stuff sets up. It's been three hours, and I've been advised not to even bother checking it until tomorrow.
The jar that didn't seal is in the fridge. Thomas had some of the leftover jelly from the pan on a sandwich and declared it good. So at the very least, we'll have strawberry sauce for ice cream, I suppose.
you can sterilize your lids and jars in the dishwasher, I'm told. that might help with the tipping over thing.
eta: god I really hate it when my browser logs me out of stuff and doesn't tell me
Posted by: mel | March 28, 2010 at 09:59 AM