Making jelly and jams
TheTasTy Muscadine The Grape of the South
My sweetie pie and I went out picking Muscadines today. I found several vines with lots of fruit in the woods behind the house. We spread a tarp under the vines and I pulled the vines out of the pine trees. I marked the vines so that we can transplant them late this fall. The vines are normally male or female, only the female vines produce fruit. There are a lot more male wild vines than female. Where we are planning on transplanting them to has plenty of male vines growing already so I only want to transplant female vines.
We washed the fruit and boiled them down for a bit. I used a heavy duty cloth bag to squeeze the pulp of the fruit and extract the juice. We wound up with 32 pints of strained juice.
Tomorrow will be a shopping day for pectin and sugar and jars and lids. I like the jellies I make to be a bit less sweet and have a lot more fruit flavor than what we find in the stores. I tasted the juice and it is a bit tart. The recipes on-line I am finding call for around a 1 to 1 ratio of sugar to juice.
I am thinking more along the lines of 1/2 to 3/4 cups of sugar per cup of juice. Last year we picked wild blackberries and if I recall correctly I added 3/4 cups sugar per cup of strained juice. It turned out very tasty.
Anyone have any advice about making jellies?
Thanks
MMW
My sweetie pie and I went out picking Muscadines today. I found several vines with lots of fruit in the woods behind the house. We spread a tarp under the vines and I pulled the vines out of the pine trees. I marked the vines so that we can transplant them late this fall. The vines are normally male or female, only the female vines produce fruit. There are a lot more male wild vines than female. Where we are planning on transplanting them to has plenty of male vines growing already so I only want to transplant female vines.
We washed the fruit and boiled them down for a bit. I used a heavy duty cloth bag to squeeze the pulp of the fruit and extract the juice. We wound up with 32 pints of strained juice.
Tomorrow will be a shopping day for pectin and sugar and jars and lids. I like the jellies I make to be a bit less sweet and have a lot more fruit flavor than what we find in the stores. I tasted the juice and it is a bit tart. The recipes on-line I am finding call for around a 1 to 1 ratio of sugar to juice.
I am thinking more along the lines of 1/2 to 3/4 cups of sugar per cup of juice. Last year we picked wild blackberries and if I recall correctly I added 3/4 cups sugar per cup of strained juice. It turned out very tasty.
Anyone have any advice about making jellies?
Thanks
MMW
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