My husband hates grape jelly. Store bought grape jelly is taboo in our house. But I wanted to play and make some homemade grape jelly just for fun! So I bought 4 LBs of dark purple grapes (they are in season and cheap!) and brought them home. He reluctantly agreed to experiment with it “just this one time!” Because he just knew he “wasn’t gonna like it!” … yeah that story changed real fast lol
After looking at recipes online we decided to make up our own method. First we rinse the grapes and took them off the vine part and put them in the crock pot with a half cup of water. The water is simply to keep the grapes from sticking to the bottom of the crock pot. We placed the crock pot on low and stirred the grapes every 30 minutes to an hour … give or take. Once the grapes got soft we then used a mash potato masher to squish the grapes. Now is when you start seeing all that wonderful juice!
Next we wanted to remove the skins from the mixture and get as much juice as possible out the mixture so we enlisted our folley mill (previously only used to make the most awesome tomato juice ever known to man kind!) here is a video of hubby using the folley mill to juice those warm squished grapes and some photos. My arm gets tired easily so he usually does this job for me 🙂 when I was a kid this was always dads job… so that there is men folk work! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
The folley mill is the hardest part of this recipe but honestly it’s not that hard folks lol. The rest is just time consuming in the fact that you gotta let the grapes do their thing like slow cook in the crock pot and… well.. the next few easy steps.
Once we have run the grapes thru the folly mill, you get a bunch of skins which have a tiny bit of juice in them… my husband now loves his grape jelly (after declaring the first batch we made as being spectacular!) and he started todays batch before I even knew what was happening! He wanted EVERY. SINGLE. DROP. Of that grape juice (this is our second time making grape jelly now) because this is now his favorite! His words not mine! (Remember the guy who said he hated grape jelly at the beginning of the story lol).
So we put cheesecloth over a sieve and those skins from the folley mill in there to get EVERY. LAST. DROP! (hubby laughing maniacally as he did so muahahahaha “my grape jelly! Come to poppa!”)
While that was draining into the now folley milled pulpy grape juice mixture…
Side note: if you want grape preserves (which is thicker and has the pulp) you can stop here and go straight to making the preserve. If you want the most silky yummy tasting grape jelly you’ve ever had then… continue reading.
Using a sieve lived with cheese cloth (I use two layers of cheese cloth) take a ladle and ladle the folley milled pulpy juices into the sieve to get that pulp out. This part takes a while but you’re not doing anything other than letting it drip… so no work involved really. Just check back every so often to add more of the pulpy juice to the sieve.
This photo shows the skins dripping from the sieve into the pulpy crock pot juices to get the last drops from those. We ladle from the crock pot (which now has the pulpy juices from the folley mill) into another sieve lined with two layers of cheese cloth which will drip into a tall stock pot. I want the height of the stock pot to give room for the sieve and the juices to drip freely which is why I use a tall stock pot to catch the now beautiful grape juice without pulp.
I stick the lid on the pot over top of the sieve (once all the pulpy juice has made it into the sieve) and let this sit on the counter to filter and drip overnight. I got over 2 quarts of juices (minus the pulp) out of this batch to start making the grape jelly… which is what we do on the second day. I started this batch with about 4 lbs of grapes. So not bad so far!
Day 2:
Prepare your pint jars as normal and get ready to can! I follow the recipe on the sure jel packet at this point. I do cut back on the sugar from that recipe tho… just my personal take… but other than that follow the directions and sweeten how you like. No secret recipe from this point forward… the trick is the fresh honest to goodness pure grape juice. No water added. No chemicals or preservatives. Just the good stuff! Can’t get any fresher or any purer that what we made above. The rest is simple and quick!
I have never had a grape jelly that tasted so … well… “grap-a-licious”! It’s so grape tasting you would swear someone added some fake grape flavoring to that grape juice somewhere along the line to get it to taste that…. Well… much… grape-ish-ness? yep I made that word up! But that’s the only way I can explain it!
I used to have to hide the black berry jam (wild berries picked fresh and home canned) from everyone, but now it’s a toss up between which one we like better … grape jelly or blackberry jam depending on what we are putting it on. BTW hubby still won’t touch store bought grape jelly but I’m lucky if I get a sample out of this stuff… I think he has been hiding it from me in the cellar house somewhere lol… it sure does disappear fast! Then there is dad who like to “shop” in the celler house… and my son… yep… I need to buy a new door lock! Lol or find a better hiding space for my own stash of jelly!
And voila! The finished product. Whatever is not enough to fill a jar gets put in a “sample tasting jar” for immediate use and placed in the fridge to cool for sampling later 🙂 happy eating!
Conestoga Chuck 