Melissa and I made crab apple jelly from our free crab apples. To say the process was tedious doesn't even begin to describe the endeavor.We started out with at least 8 quarts of crab apples, each one of which had to be cut in half. Then the stems and blossom ends had to be removed. This took the two of us about 1 1/2 hours.
The prepared crab apples were then cooked in a large pot with several cups of water for about 25 minutes to extract the juice.
The whole mess was then drained and strained. The apples are thrown away and the juice is ready to turn into jelly.
There is enough pectin in the crab apple juice that you only have to add sugar and cook it down, but I always worry too much to trust the process, so I used Sure Jell.
The jelly is a beautiful, delicate pink.
The tart/sweet flavor is out of this world, but I don't know how willing we'll be to go through all the work again.
Then again, the crab apples were free...
4 comments:
I have eaten some raw and didn't even know they were for human consumption. lol. Nice to see it is officially o.k. for humans. I didn't grow up here and I have never seen anyone eat them or jelly them.
I'll have to give you one of the jars of jelly, Heather. It's really yummy!
Where's my jar of jelly.
ougga
i'm thinking of linking to this post for one of my examiner articles. let me know what you think about that. examiner dot com > frugal family
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