Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Plum Jelly - Attempt 1

I said I was going to try to make some jam, didn't I? So I gave it a try today with some plums I bought from the grocery store...trial batch. It went pretty good, and I got seven jars out of it. It's kind of a not nice process for people like me who have "sticky issues".....waaaay to much stickiness. Smells like heaven, though, and should taste just as wonderful.  
I took a few pictures of the process to share:






This is after a 60 second dunking in boiling water to loosen the skins...you can see they're popping off easily. This was fairly easy.




This is after the peels came off...and so began the first icky part of the process....because those things in that bowl are soooo slimy....ewwww!!! And the pits were hard to remove. Getting them into little pieces was easy-that sort of happened while I was trying to remove the pits!
Once I got them into pieces I put them in a stockpot with a bit of water and some white grape juice.




Then I brought them to a boil, then turned down the heat and let them simmer for about 45 minutes. At that point, I meant to take another picture for you to see what they looked like...but my girl Ashley was over here, so I got distracted. 
After they were simmered down to the point there were no chunks, I brought it to a boil again and added the pectin, stirring until it was dissolved. Again, I was distracted, so I forgot to take a picture. Once the pectin was added(with a tiny bit of butter to reduce the foam), I added the sugar, stirred until it dissolved, then brought the whole mess to a full rolling boil for 1 minute. Then I turned off the burner, and ladled it into jars, and covered the filled jars with hot lids. Again....no picture.(Hey, there was important girl convo going on...it couldn't be helped.)
I then screwed on the screwy thingies....rims? Then I immersed all of them in a hot water bath for 10 minutes before removing them.
And here is the final result:



Pretty! Five of them sealed immediately...I know sometimes it can take awhile for them to seal, so I'll wait for tomorrow to check seals again. Cross your fingers....I'm crossing mine!





Such a pretty color with the light behind it!


So that was my first attempt at fruit jelly. We'll see how it turns out, and I'll let all of you know! 


MandaMac

2 comments:

Originals by Lauren said...

How interesting, I don't know how to make jelly! I am going to start following you.


I would be honored if you used photos of my aprons, feel free to do so. Thanks for asking

Lauren

MandaMac said...

Thanks! I just got started on the jelly thing myself...I had an overabundance of lemon balm in my garden and was trying to figure out what to do with it, and I ran across a recipe for lemon balm jelly, so I took a deep breath and gave it a try! Despite the fact that I watched my mom can, and I had a general idea how the process worked, I was totally surprised that it worked...and it was easy! LOL

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