Red Currant Jelly

This jelly is pure gold- hand picked from my garden and canned within the hour!  Perfect… well, almost.  This week I tried out a couple of recipes.  The first batch resulted in a soft gel, perfect for a syrup on pancakes or waffles, a baste on a pork roast, the finishing touch to a fruit pie.  The second batch came out as a more “solid” jelly and that’s the one I will go with.

This is a recipe from Cathy Barrow’s Mrs Wheelbarrow’s Practical Pantry, one of my go-to canning books.

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Red currants are blessed with lots of natural pectin so you should only need to add sugar and lemon juice to the mix.

For approximately 3 x 250 ml jars

Ingredients:

2 lbs           red currants (about 2 hours of picking)

1/2 cup       water

2 1/2 cups  granulated sugar

Directions

Gently rinse the berries and ensure the stems are plucked from the berries.  Add the berries and 1/2 cup of water to a 3 QT pan.  Bring to a boil, then mash the currants with a potato masher to release some of the juices.  Remove from heat and cool for 30 minutes.

Ladle the fruit into a jelly bag or cheesecloth lined colander and set over a catch bowl.  Let drip for four hours.  Do not squeeze the bag or your jelly will be cloudy.  Cloudy is fine if you favour flavour over a clear jelly.

Measure the juice and measure out an equal amount of sugar.  Pour the juice into the preserving pan and bring to a strong boil.  Add the sugar and lemon juice, start stirring.  Keep stirring while it gets to a boil that cannot be stirred down and boil hard for five minutes.  Turn down the heat and continue to stir.  The jelly should begin to get slightly.  The temperature should read 220 degrees about this time.  If not, keep heating until it reaches 220 degrees.

Ladle the jelly into the warm jars leaving 1/2 inch headspace.  Wipe the rims of the jars.  Place the lids and rings on the jars.  Process in a steamer canner (or water bath canner) for ten minutes.