Les Bonnes Choses

I just finished sealing up 5 small mason jars with hot, hot crabapple jelly. There was a little bit left cooling at the bottom of the pot, so I toasted up a cranberry-orange breakfast pita and smeared it with the remainder. Damn, it's good. The mulling spices really make it interesting. I hope to share it. Here is the final recipe that worked (sorry, it uses imperial units):

• You will first need:
  
  
  
  1. A few pounds of crabapples - mostly ripe, some not quite ripe. No bruised ones.
  
  
  2. For each pound of crabapples, one cup of water
  
  
  
  Wash and cut the crabapples in half, to make sure that you're not making crabapple and worm jelly. I read you're supposed to take the stems off too. I didn't bother. Put the apples in a big, big pot.



• Boil until they are mushy, mushy. Drain it all for several hours in a colander lined with cheesecloth (you should have cheesecloth from my previous experiment draining yogurt for tzatziki). Now you have a bunch of juice.



• Make sure that the juice has enough pectin. That's what wrecked it the first time for me. You can test this by putting 1 tbsp of rubbing alcohol on a saucer, then adding 1 tsp of the juice. If there is enough pectin, the alcohol causes juice to congeal in to a jelly that you can actually lift out on the tines of a fork. I have no plan for what if it doesn't congeal at this time, though I might consider reusing the juice in place of water to boil another pile of apples.



• Now for the jelly. You will need:
  
  1. Your pectin-laden crabapple juice. Note how many cups of juice you had.
  
  
  2. For each cup of juice, you need one cup of white sugar.
  
  
  3. A teaball or small cloth baggie (perhaps fashioned out of cheesecloth) containing 1 tbsp of mulling spices (sticks of cinnamon and cloves work fine)
  
  
  
  
• Throw the spices into the juice and bring to a boil.


• Add the sugar. Bring the resulting syrup to a rolling boil, occasionally skimming off the foam.



• During this time, you may as well be boiling a bunch of jelly jars in a big pot of water, because you will want them sterilized by the time your jelly is finished cooking. Unless botulism is your thing. To my knowledge though, there is not an underground market for homemade botox.



• When the syrup takes on the consistency of cough-syrup, and appears to move like a rolling sheet on the back of a spoon, it's done. Alternately, if you have a candy thermometer, it should reach 220°F. At this time, you can ladle it into your sterilized jars.

I think my jelly took longer than it should have because I may not have had the syrup boiling hot enough. It seemed to be taking forever until I cranked the burner up high enough that it boiled into a foaming mass that threatened to boil over the side. Then I turned it down, and when I did so, I noticed that it was no longer watery, but instead seemed to flow on the spoon. If I had a candy thermometer, I may have figured it out earlier.

Now, back to paring down my dissertation so I can get it published.