Apple Cider Jelly

This week we joined the Crispin family at Kara's Parent's house in Oregon.  It was an amazing week of sunshine, river rapids, beach waves, and food.  Lots of food.  All the food was fresh and amazing - garden fresh veggies, fresh caught crab, delicious Columbia Valley wines with cheese, and lots of peanut butter and homemade-blackberry-jam sandwiches to fill in the gaps.

On Saturday, we joined in on the family tradition and helped with the fall cider pressing!  About 4 families get together with their apple crops, and everyone helps with the pressing.  It only took us about 3 hours to get 90 gallons!!  Then we all sat down to a taco lunch, and took our juice home for canning - we brought home 25 gallons.  Kathy let me take about 7 gallons home, including a 'raw' gallon for making jelly.  She said that fresh-pressed-cider jelly is delicious, and I could just look up the regular apple jelly recipe and use that.

Well guess what?  No regular Ball apple jelly recipes are available.  With the advent of their new Jam Maker, now most of the basic recipes have been re-written for that!  Of course, you can probably still use the old method with the new recipes, but I'm not a master jelly maker, and I wasn't sure if the amounts would be the same whether using the machine or doing it by hand.

They do have their pectin calculator online, so I used that to get my amounts.  So here I have the recipe from the Pectin Calculator, written out nice and neat for future reference.  I'm presuming that it would be the same as the Original Ball Canning Apple Jelly Recipe, using pectin to thicken (not the boil-to-gel method)

For every 2 (8 oz) half pints, you will need:	Traditional	Reduced Sugar
Apple juice	1 1/2 cups	1 1/2 cups
Ball® RealFruit™ Classic Pectin	2 Tbsp	2 Tbsp
Granulated sugar	1 2/3 cups	1 cup

Apple Cider Jelly 

(this is a 5x batch which should yield 10 half-pints or 5 pints)

7.5 C  fresh pressed apple cider (or store bought cider or juice)

5 C sugar (this is reduced sugar since our cider was very sweet.  Use up to 8C sugar if necessary)

10 T Classic Pectin 

Since our cider was already pressed, we start with a juice measurement.  If you have whole apples, you'll need to look up how to prepare them to get juice.

MAKE YOUR JELLY

1. PREPARE waterbath canner, jars and lids according to manufacturer's instructions, if preserving.* Prepare and measure ingredients for recipe.
2. COMBINE prepared juice in an 1 gal stockpot. Gradually stir in Ball® RealFruit™ Pectin. Add butter, if using. Bring mixture to a full rolling boil that cannot be stirred down, over high heat, stirring constantly.
3. ADD entire measure of sugar, stirring to dissolve. Return mixture to a full rolling boil. Boil hard 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Skim foam if necessary.
4. Process in hot water bath for 10 minutes.

*If you are preserving at an altitude higher than 1,000 feet above sea level, adjust processing time as indicated by the altitude chart.

QUICK TIP: Adding up to 1/4 tsp butter or margarine will reduce foaming.