It Must Be Jelly ‘Cause Jam Don’t Shake Like That: Part 2

Today my husband took the kids with him all day, so I took advantage of having free reign over my kitchen to finish the jelly-making process without fear of accidentally scalding one of my children. As you may remember from my previous blog entry, I had finished picking, cleaning, and juicing the grapes, so I was beginning with a large bowl of unfiltered grape juice. The next step, of course, was to filter the juice. I’d forgotten to pick up cheesecloth, but fortunately, I had read that a white pillowcase also works well, and since I happened to have recently accidentally torn a hole in an off-white pillowcase, that’s what I used. I dampened it, draped it over a large rubber measuring cup, and began ladling out my precious nectar.

Drip…drip…drip… I had thought that cleaning the grapes was the most tedious part of the process, but apparently I was wrong. Fortunately, I needed to sterilize my canning jars, so I began working on that project while I waited for the juice to strain. 

Once my giant pot of water came to a boil and I carefully lifted the canning jars in with my tongs, I realized I had slightly miscalculated the depth of the water. I topped up the pot a bit and…waited some more. Who knew that canning involved so much waiting for stuff?

Anyway, eventually the jars were sterilized and the juice was filtered, so I was ready to go on to the next step: boiling the juice and adding the pectin and the sugar. I measured out the proper amount of juice and set it on the stove to boil, emptied in my box of pectin, and then measured out the proper amount of sugar. Wow, does Concord grape jelly require a lot of sugar!

I enjoyed the steamy tartness wafting up from the hot juice while I stirred it, and despite my watching it came to a boil fairly quickly. In fact, it boiled up a bit too quickly and I panicked for a moment, then thanked my stars that I’d used my largest pot, otherwise I’d be wiping a sticky foamy mess off my stovetop. I lowered the heat, stirred in that massive bowl of sugar, and then waited again for it to come to a boil. It was fun to see the pale clots of sugar shrinking and finally dissolving to nothing in the hot liquid, watching the color of the juice darken and the cloudiness of the liquid clarify as I stirred and stirred. As soon as it boiled again, I set my timer for the “EXACTLY one minute” that my recipe threatened was of such critical importance. “Sixty-one seconds shalt thou not count, neither count thou to fifty-nine, excepting that thou then proceed to sixty. Sixty-two is right out.” (Proof that Monty Python quotes are appropriate for any occasion, including the making of grape jelly.)

The next instruction in my recipe was to “skim the foam.” That sounds simple enough, but I’m guessing there is a special foam-skimming technique or tool with which I am not familiar. I opted for the advanced technique of scooping it off with a plastic spoon, dumping it into a glass measuring cup, and then wiping the spoon on a paper towel before going back for more foam, but I must admit that when I was “done,” there were still some flecks of foam on my jelly. But considering how much I started with, I’ll give myself credit for a 97+% recovery. 

And now, the best part (well, if you don’t include the “eating” part): ladling the finished product into the jars. Up until this point, all I had was a big pot of pretty-colored, pleasant-smelling goop. But somehow once you put that same goop into a crystal-cut glass canning jar, it magically becomes jelly. Home-grown, home-made, Concord grape jelly, a delicious creation formed out of almost nothing by the power of my own two lily-white hands (well, with a little help from Miracle-Gro, pectin, and a giant bowl of sugar).

 (Insert sound of angels singing here)

And now comes the REALLY best part of the process: that last little half-ladleful at the bottom of the pot that doesn’t quite fit into that last jar and which has finally cooled enough that it won’t scald your tongue from here till next Tuesday. The real moment of truth. I scooped up a spoonful and hesitantly stuck it in my mouth. Would it be tart? Grainy? Bland? No. It was smooth, richly flavorful, sweet at first but with a powerfully tart kick following close behind. It was an adventure for the taste buds. Before I even realized what I was doing, I had spooned spoonful after spoonful into my mouth, savoring that puckery feeling at the back of my tongue each time the tart wave followed the sweet beginning. I came to myself just in time to remember I hadn’t finished the process.

Ah, “process.” Another culinary word in my recipe that I wasn’t entirely sure of. “Process for 5 minutes.” Wait, what does that mean? A frantic flip through the recipe booklet that came inside the pectin box soon set me straight: “process” simply means to boil the sealed jars. OK, I can do that. That kind of kitchen technique is just about my speed. I even had a sudden memory of my mom throwing a dish towel in the bottom of her canning pot when the bottom rack rusted through. So back into the pot of boiling water went a dish towel and the now-full jars.

But I had one more step left to go before I felt I had really and truly joined the ranks of the Canning World. I had to put official labels on my jars. For this momentous occasion, a simple black pen would not do. So I dug through that drawer that everyone has in their kitchen. You know the one. It has a collection of pens and pencils and markers from sources unknown, half of which don’t write and several of which seem to bear printing in another language. And from the depths of that drawer, I came up with a metallic gold Sharpie. Eight jars, eight carefully printed labels: “Concord Grape Jelly 8/2013”.

Three words and a handful of numbers to represent days of work creating the magic substance inside the jars. Admittedly, it wasn’t quite as much work as I was afraid it would be. And I’m kind of excited that there are enough grapes left on the vine to wait a few more weeks or even months (as suggested by a friend who is an experienced Concord grape grower and jelly-maker) to reap another harvest and take another crack at this. But for now, I’m very happy with my results. So happy, in fact that I might just have to go bake some bread to spread my jelly on. Maybe next year I might even try growing my own peanuts and making home-made peanut butter!! Yeah, maybe not.

It Must Be Jelly ‘Cause Jam Don’t Shake Like That: Part 1

Shortly before we were married, my now-husband planted a Concord grapevine in the back yard. It didn’t produce much other than leaves for the first few years, but last year it finally taunted us with a few tiny, stunted, green grapes. This summer, however, the vine came into its own and we discovered a month or so ago that it was covered with bunches and bunches of fat grapes.

Over the past couple of weeks, the grapes have turned a luscious, rich purple and have begun to send a wonderful, sweet, fruity aroma wafting around the garden. So yesterday morning, I grabbed a basket and a pair of scissors and harvested our first official batch of grapes.

I have always heard that Concord grapes are quite tart and full of seeds, so the best way to use them is to make jelly. Although my grandmother had an extensive garden and a larder that was always chock full of fruits and vegetables and jellies and jams and preserves that she’d canned herself, and during my childhood my mother did some canning on occasion as well, canning is a culinary endeavor I’ve never tried myself. So when I decided to try putting some Concord grape jelly up in jars, I did what I always do when I try something new: I asked for advice on Facebook.

My Facebook friends were, as always, more than up to the task. They sent me recipes, advice, and – possibly most helpful of all – links to online videos that walk the viewer through the whole process, step by step. One of the earliest bits of advice I got was not to wait too long between harvesting the grapes and making the jelly, to avoid attracting fruit flies, so without further ado, I printed out one of the simpler (and smaller batch) recipes I had found, glanced at a video or two, and got to work.

The first step seemed pretty easy: strip the stems from 3-1/2 pounds of Concord grapes and wash them. But how does one measure 3-1/2 pounds of grapes? Obviously, with a scale. I don’t have a kitchen scale that goes up to 3-1/2 pounds, so I went with the only other scale I have in the house: my bathroom scale. I carefully lugged it downstairs to the kitchen and placed the basket of grapes on it, figuring I’d weigh the basket afterwards and subtract. However, there wasn’t enough weight to trigger the electronic scale. No problem, the heavy stockpot I planned to boil the grapes in must weigh enough to register, right? Nope. Undaunted by this complication, I took one for the team and stepped on the scale myself. (Believe me, for any woman over forty with two children who’s not an athlete or a supermodel, this is a true sacrifice.) After the initial shock of seeing those numbers, I weighed myself once more holding the stockpot, and a bit of simple math showed that the pot weighed exactly four pounds.

Okay, now I was ready to start picking grapes. So I picked. And I picked. And I picked. And I weighed. One pound. Only ONE pound? I felt like I must have cleaned about eight pounds by that point. So I picked some more. And some more. And I weighed again. And on and on, until it seemed like I’d been picking grapes for the better part of the day (it had actually been about 45 minutes). But I finally got the scale up to 3-1/2 pounds of grapes (which was, quite conveniently, exactly the amount of grapes I had picked), and I was ready to move on to Step 2: Mashing and Boiling.

Little did I know how satisfying it is to mash grapes! With those firm skins, I expected a nice “pop” reminiscent of bubble wrap with each application of my potato masher (real canners probably have a better tool, but for my purposes, the masher worked just fine), but instead I got a loud, juicy, satisfying “SQUELCH!!” And the more I mashed, the squelchier it got. In direct opposition to the picking part of the process, I felt like I’d only been mashing for a few seconds when I glanced at the clock and realized it had been a full 20 minutes. My grapes were now a juicy, pulpy, seedy, green-and-purple sludge, so I stirred in a bit more water and set the pot on the stove to boil. Checking it a few minutes later, the juice was boiling merrily, stirring up a foamy froth and releasing even more of the grapes’ rich, fruity, sweet-tart aroma. After ten minutes, I turned off the heat and got ready for Step 3: Straining.

Carefully balancing the metal strainer over the largest mixing bowl I had, I poured out the steaming sludge. Rivers of a pinkish-purple liquid ran into the bowl, releasing steam as it poured. With the help of a big plastic spoon, I mushed and mashed the sludge against the bottom of the strainer to get out every last drop of juice. Smearing and squishing like I was spreading peanut butter, I finally satisfied myself that I had extracted every bit of juice that I was going to get.

And then came the hardest step of all: Waiting. I had to leave this bowl of gorgeous nectar overnight to cool, so that my jelly, once made, wouldn’t form crystals. And I’m sorry to say, that means that you, my reader, will also have to wait until tomorrow for the next installment of my jelly-making saga…