Gardening By Cuisine: How to Make Jelly and Jam

Hi, I am going to make some jelly and I’m using some grapes that I just harvested from my garden and I am using some blueberries. Now, I froze these blueberries earlier in the season and I’m going to combine them both and I’m going to make a very unique jelly. I’ve got my pureeier here so the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to take a bunch of the blueberries and I’m going to put them in the bowl and I just kind of mash them. I don’t want to puree all of the mixture that I’m going to make and oh, looks so good, dump in the rest of the blueberries. Oh look at that juice already coming out.
Not that, and now I’m going to dump in all these grapes, you can see that all of the juices are coming out and into this bowl here and all the stuff I don’t want is coming out the other end. Now when you’re making this jam, you know, you’re going to have to add sugar. It really depends on you as to how much sugar you want to add. These grapes are pretty sweet; they’re not tart so I definitely don’t want to add too much sugar. Mix this up; I’m going to taste this; it is so good, and you know what? I’m really going to make sure that I don’t over-sugar it cause it is so sweet right now. Now what I want to do is basically just let this come to a boil then I’m going to add my sugar and then I’m going to let that come to a boil and that’s going to allow the sugar to dissolve in the juices here, my fruit juices; and then I’m going to add pectin; and pectin is basically what’s going to help the jelly form into jelly and thicken up. It’s basically an all-natural product that’s actually made of apples; I’m going to add that in here and we’re going to stir it continuously. Oh its sweet, it’s juicy, yum. Alright, this is good to go and while it’s boiling and still hot I am going to put it in my jars, and you want to make sure that you leave at least a quarter of an inch of head room in the jar, so you don’t want to fill it up all the way.
Now of course it’s still looking liquid-y because as it cools it’s going to thicken up, wow look at that. Sorry I have to taste this. So good. This is jelly, so good.
Alright, I just got to put the lids on these jars but I want to make sure that the edges of them have no jelly on it whatsoever, cause I want to make sure that the lids are perfectly attached to the tops on these dryers. We don’t want any space or anything in the way of that. Alright so I have water boiling here in my pressure cooker, of course it looks like it’s a huge pot but the reason why I’m using this pot is because I’ve got 12 jars and they’re going to fit perfectly all in one layer at the bottom of this pot.
It is boiling and I’m going to leave it boiling for about 10 minutes and then I’m going to take it out, let it cool and I basically got 1 jar of blueberry-grape jelly for every month of the year. I’m Patty Moreno , the Garden Girl, thanks for watching.


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