Oh my aching back
Today, I spent from 3pm on doing something with grapes.
I could not have been more pleased with the grapes hanging from the trellis. They were beautiful, plump and dark red. From the ladder, I was able to snip the grape clusters and have them fall right into my hands. I filled 5 large bowls full of them and there are still more on the vines (sorry, I won’t deal with the ones where there are spiders).
The green grapes weren’t as prolific as in years past, but that may be because there is more competition for water on my neighbor’s side of the fence (where the roots are). She also has blueberry bushes, rose bushes and a bunch of apple trees. This year it was pretty dry too.
I cut back the green grape vines like I always do and wound up filling a big 5 gallon bucket full, plus one more large bowl full. I didn’t even harvest off my neighbor’s side either.
My sister showed up (and my husband woke up) right as I was finishing with the picking. She had brought a 12 pack of jars and 5 boxes of pectin. Then we began the cleaning and juicing process. They put the grapes into the non-disposal half of our sink, filled it with water and started cleaning. All the clean grapes went into a collander, from where I snagged them. I pushed the grapes through my Juiceman juicer, getting some amount of juice out one side and “waste” (the skins seeds and more juice) out the other side.
I did a bunch of steps where I pressed additional juice out of the “waste”, filtered whatever juice I had through a strainer, and also used a Oxo gravy separator to get progressively clearer and clearer liquid. My sister said a Chinois Juice Extractor would have helped – she used one last year. I also skimmed off what I could when I boiled the juice.
We made 3 batches because I only had 1 stockpot (for boiling jars) and 1 dutch oven (for doing the jelly). The first batch was more of a teaching batch, just to get the concepts of canning.
- 4 cups red grape juice
- 4 cups white grape juice
- 2 cups water
We boiled that, then let it cool. We measured out 5.5 cups of the juice (which is quite tastey), and brought that back to a boil. Then we added 3.5 cups of sugar, let that all melt and boil, then added 1/4 cup of sugar with the SureJell Pectin for Less or No sugar recipes. Yes. 3.75 cups of sugar is considered Low Sugar. Shocks me. At the last minute she adds a bit of butter to get the jelly to stop foaming – my guess is the fat in the butter breaks down the surface tension on the bubbles.
We put that batch of jelly in the jars and started on another batch of juice. But this one I screwed up a bit – I added double the water. We finished the process and waited 24 hours. That batch never really jelled right.
Another batch we did (with less water), we ran out of white sugar and added 1/2 a cup of brown sugar. I haven’t tasted it yet, but I bet it will add a good flavor.
Now comes the science part: my goal is to test various mixtures of the juice – today’s batch was 50/50 – white and red with “low sugar.” Tomorrow we’ll make another batch that’s 1/3 red and 2/3 white. My sister said last year she, because she had mostly white grapes, she added other berries like blackberries. In fact she brought over 4 quarts of left over grape blackberry juice that we can make into jelly tomorrow.
We have a long list of things to buy for the tomorrow: a metal funnel, more jars, lids and pectin, a 10 lb bag of sugar, and cheese cloth. My sister is also going to bring over her stockpot so we could have 1 stockpot cooking the jelly while the other was available for sterilizing the jars.
I spent the rest of the night cleaning the sticky counters. The floor will have to wait until tomorrow.
