Homemade Crab Apple Jelly – or – That Must be Jelly because Jam don’t Shake like that!
We have a couple of crab apple trees in our yard that we have never done anything with. Our son Chris said let’s make jelly! Ok. Every other year we just watch the deer come and eat the fallen crab apples so why not give making jelly a try? (maybe we will have fewer deer destroying our yard)
These trees were planted by my grandfather many decades ago and still produce a tremendous amount of fruit. I was thrilled that my oldest son wanted to try making jelly.
First step of course was picking enough of the crab apples to make a batch of jelly. Crab apples are small and we don’t spray these trees so about every third apple is usable. It actually took quite a bit longer than I thought it would to get enough apples for our recipe.
We had a very stormy week with lots of rain, wind and hail. The trees and leaves are a little beat up from the hail. It was definitely time to harvest what we could salvage.
We used the Certo Sure Jell recipe. It’s always a good idea to use publish, tested recipes when you are preserving.
The Certo brand recipes are very easy to follow. All we did was dice our apples and boil simmer them in a pot until it turned to mush.
Then, we strained the juice out using a jelly bag.
While we were waiting for the juice to strain, we sanitized our jars in a water bath and set them in the oven until we needed them. We also kept the lids in simmering water as well.
We mixed 5 cups of the juice with 7 1/2 cups of sugar and brought it to a rolling boil. Then we added the pectin, boiled for one more minute and packed the juice in our cans.
We brought the jars back out to our water bath for a quick 5 minute bath and we were all done!
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