Making Jelly from Fruit Juice

This past Monday, New Moon Circle, a group within the Garden, had a social time with jelly making. Seems we always end up with an abundance of fruit juice from commodities and other sources and needed to find a way to use it up so that no food goes to waste.

We used the half-recipe so as to make all our other ingredients stretch further.

Here are the measurements for the half recipe:

4 cups fruit juice
3 c. sugar
1/4 c. lemon juice
1pkg. powdered pectin

For a full recipe, use these measurements:

1 jar fruit juice (1/2 gal.)
6 c. sugar
1/2 c. lemon juice
2 pkg. powdered pectin

We made several flavors, but note that we did not use the lemon juice in the orange juice jelly.

1. Combine fruit juice, lemon juice and pectin in a large sauce pot. Stir over medium-­high heat
until pectin dissolves (about 20 minutes).

2. Mixture will come to a rolling boil. Stir in sugar and return to rolling boil (about 5 minutes).

3. Boil hard 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Skim foam if necessary. (We discovered that some flavors needed to boil longer to start setting up a jell.)

4. Pour hot liquid into sterilized jars, leaving 1/4 inch head space. Adjust caps. Turn upside-down while cooling 5 - 10 minutes.

5. Turn right-side-up to finish cooling and create vacuum in jar.

Full recipe yields about 10 half pints.


More information and inspiration can be found here:
 http://www.pickyourown.org/makejellyfromjuice.htm
and also here:
https://youtu.be/F88Pjnclos4


We have grape, cranberry, apple-cherry, apple-raspberry, orange, and apple-cranberry to sample and I think all of us are excited to try this again very soon!  Steph took some pics while we were stirring, so you may see our jelly making mugs on the intrawebs in the near future. :-)

Much love and hugs to you all. Mahalo!