This weekend I picked almost 5 pounds of crabapples from our tree out front and decided to try my hand at making jelly for the first time. Crabapple jelly is super hard to find; it certainly isn't on any supermarket shelves!
I wasn't prepared for the level of work the jelly would require. Between slicing off the stem and blossom ends, cutting the fruit into chunks, boiling it with a cinnamon stick to extract juice, tying the whole pot of stewed fruit into cheesecloth and letting it drip into a bowl, cooking the strained juice with sugar until it reached the gelling stage, filling the sterilized jars with hot jelly, and processing them in a hot water bath, this took all damn day. All for this:
Three half pints! (It would have been four, but I spilled some of the juice in the middle of the process. I cursed like a sailor when that happened). Even though it's not a lot of jelly, isn't it beautiful? I'm amazed at the ruby red color, which was unexpected.
I sure hope it tastes as good as it looks! All in all, it was a fun experience even if it was time consuming. Our tree is still very young, so I expect I'll have the opportunity to make lots of jelly in the future as long as I feel like devoting the time to it.
