- Wash 6 pounds of apples, cut them in quarters without removing neither the skins nor the cores. Make sure to remove any blemishes and rotten bits. Put them in a large pot and add water. The link above suggests 1 cup of water per pound of fruit, but 6 cups of water did not cover our fruit. I think we added about 10 cups of water. Looking back, we should have cut the fruit in smaller pieces...
- Cook the apples until they fall apart and become a mush. This took about 25 minutes for us. Then, you have to separate the juice from the pulp. We did this with an old white t-shirt. Cut the t-shirt in half and line two large colanders with the two halves, which you have wetted beforehand. Suspend the colanders over empty pots, add the pulp, cover it, and let it drip. Everybody says to let it drip overnight, we let ours drip for about 8 hours. Do not press on the pulp to extract more juice as this seems to produce a cloudy jelly. Collect the juice in a single pot and measure its volume. We got 10 cups of juice. There are probably uses for the leftover pulp, but this time we discarded ours.
- Add 3/4 cup of sugar per cup of juice. Many recipes call for equal parts sugar and juice, but the link above calls for less sugar. These are ripe apples and quite sweet, so we were happy to add less sugar. Add also one and a half teaspoon of fresh lemon juice per cup of apple juice. The next step is to boil the juice until it gels. To test that this has been achieved, there are various methods, some of which are described here. Having a candy thermometer is important, but we got the impression from a blog post we read that getting to the right temperature (220 F at sea level) is not enough, and that we need to make sure that the juice has gelled using the spoon and/or dish method also. Since our jelly turned out a bit too thick for our taste, if we were to do this again we would have stopped as soon as the temperature had reached 220 F. When we stopped, the temperature was 220 F, but it had been there for more than 10 minutes. I guess this requires a bit of practice. We did skim the surface of the foam that was constantly accumulating.
- We then quickly added the jelly to hot Mason jars and processed the jars for 5 minutes. I am skipping all the details on how to do this, as we have posted about this technique before. Below is the finished product. Look at the beautiful color! We got 8 half pint jars plus two 4 oz jars, which we processed, and then one Bonne Maman jar which we did not process and will eat shortly. The two small jars we gave as a present to our son's daycare teachers. The jelly is very beautiful! It seems to have a bit too much lemon juice, and that is my fault as I did not follow the instructions to the letter. The consistency is that of store-bought jelly, which seems a bit artificial to us. Next time, stop as soon as the temperature reaches 220 F...
Just one final observation: these apples are absolutely organic; in fact, the apple tree sits on land which is practically abandoned, so it wasn't even pruned. Since we use the skin of the apple, it doesn't make sense to make this recipe with any other type of apple: most store-bought apples are waxed and washing them will not remove all the wax, not to mention all the pesticides and other chemicals.
