Too Much Jelly

I have spent much of this week in a jelly-making frenzy. We had this large bucket of quince left over from the annual quince harvest, you see, and it needed to be made into jelly. Or something.

So now I will give you a guided tour through the first stages of jelly-making.

First, you wash the fluff off your quinces. Then chop the quinces into quarters and remove the stems and blossom-ends (the butt of the quince, as it were). You leave in the core and seeds, and the skin, because those have the pectin in them, and of all things you should not be adding pectin to quince.

You put the fruit in a large pot and just cover them with water. This picture shows too many darned quince in the pot; I had to get another pot out and shift some quince over. This was about fifteen pounds of quinces, maybe more; the scale couldn't go that high.

Don't worry too much about how much water you have in there, but don't over-do it. All that water will need to be boiled out in the end.

I boil the quince until they are soft enough that I can stick a wooden spoon through the fruit and break it in half. With our quince, this is a couple of hours.

Then I process the water and fruit through a chinois:

This gives me a nice juice, which I can filter.

And pulp, which I could process through a food mill to turn into a nice compote with spices, but instead I just compost because there's only so much quince I can handle.

The juice I filter through a muslin sack.

I hang the sack over a pot (with a collander there to catch it if it falls), and let it drip overnight. This works with varying success, and sometimes I have to pour the juice out and filter it in a jelly bag (which is a tight mesh but less tight than muslin).

Goldie likes this part.

The long part comes next. I take that juice and measure it out, putting equal volumes of juice and sugar in a pot. I add a bunch of lemon juice to activate the pectin, and then I boil.

It starts out this lovely golden colour, but it will end up red, so you must boil it until it is red. The best way to ensure a good set is to learn to do the spoon test, and the best way to do that is to take pretty much ever spoon you own and put them in the freezer.

So here are some videos showing the juice at various stages. With a less watery juice, you would progress through these stages somewhat faster than I did with this quince juice (which took up to two hours to boil down enough to jell).

Here's juice that really clearly is not going to pass the spoon test:

And this juice is ready; you can see the deep red colour, and the spoon test shows the jelly clumping up pretty quickly:

As with many worthwhile things, jelly making is part art, part science.

So we ended up with more than 24 half-pint jars of quince jelly, and I still have a pitcher with eight more cups of juice waiting to be turned into jelly (it turns into jelly at about one cup of jelly per cup of juice before adding the sugar and lemon). I've run out of jars. I think maybe we will not make quince jelly for a few years after this.

# Posted by ayse on 12/18/08 at 3:55 PM | Comments (0)

What I Did All Weekend (and Today)

OK, so let's just admit that this blog has become less a regular thing and more a periodic thing. That's fine: I spend a lot of time and energy on the work on Casa Decrepit these days, which pretty much uses up my blogging energy. But I did some non-house things this weekend! Look!

For example, on Saturday we went to a big Open House and Holiday Gift Sale at The Crucible. The Crucible is awesome because a) it is right next door in Oakland, so it is convenient, as opposed to Techshop, which requires what can be a two hour commute and b) it has a ceramics studio. I got into a good conversation about slipcasting with one of their ceramics people; I'd like to be able to find a nice studio to work in since plaster mold making is pretty messy. We shall see what will come of it.

Also, despite the fact that it poured rain on us while we were hauling the tree and decorations out of the basement, we got the tree up and decorated. Yay, us. And on the pink Sunday of Advent, too, which is pretty good for not having really planned it.

The only fly in the ointment is that we needed some replacement bulbs, and when we went to a few stores to try to find them, the places were practically cleared of Christmas stuff. That's right: I bet you didn't realize Christmas is over, and the clearance sales can begin. So now if you don't plan to have all your Christmas decorations up and running by Thanksgiving, give up; you will not be able to find replacement bulbs or even a few strands of tinsel garland. This is the same logic by which it is impossible to find a bathing suit in August, or a sweater in February. If you don't plan ahead, you don't get anything.

Anyway, the tree looks a little lopsided, and we are missing lots of bulbs from one strand of lights, but it's up. And look at my fun new ornament, purchased last weekend at a women's crafts fair:

I love how it's kind of creepy and weird and also awesome. It's a partridge in a pear tree, obviously, inside of a goose egg. If I'd had infinite money, I would have bought the set of twelve. But no infinite money, and just one goose egg ornament. I guess a partridge egg would have been impossible to come by.

So that was my weekend. To make up for a relatively unproductive weekend, this morning I did some cooking:

First on my list was fixing some failed quince jelly. Not quince jelly from this year. No, quince jelly from LAST year. It just didn't set, and as depressing as that is, there is a fix for it. So here we are: I reboiled the jelly to fix it.

I was kind of slapdash in testing the jelly the first time, which would be why it failed to set, so this time I was more careful. Here we have the jelly blobbing up to show me it is done. All that jelly all over the plate is previous tests.

My secret trick to making canning go faster is to wash and heat the jars and lids in the dishwasher rather than in the pot on the stove. If I keep the door shut, they stay warm, and I know they're very clean.

From seven jars of not-set jelly, I got five jars of set jelly. Here are four of them processing away in the water bath.

And here's the fifth, which didn't fill up all the way. I used to try to can these, too, but I find that they don't seal right and you have to keep them in the fridge right away anyhow, so I don't bother any more. This will just be the first jar we eat.

So, quince jelly sorted out, I'm waiting for the pots and so forth to wash up in the dishwasher so I can work on the tomato jelly. In the meantime, I made cinnamon rolls using the Amish Friendship Bread starter I've had kicking around. This recipe looked kind of messed up to me, so I won't put it up here, but it started out looking pretty edible:

It just had a hard time baking up to anything decent:

I generally expect a little more browning from my cinnamon rolls. They're cooked all the way through, but look like dough. When they cool down, I'll see how they taste.

# Posted by ayse on 12/15/08 at 2:33 PM | Comments (0)

Experiments in Alcohol

This evening Noel and I made some quince ratafia. We used a recipe I found online, which is always a crapshoot. The idea is pretty simple: you shred some quince, stuff it in a quart mason jar, and add sugar and spices (we added cinnamon and ginger; the recipe called for mace but we didn't have any), cover with vodka or brandy and let it sit for a couple of months.

We tried a few variations on the recipe: with vodka, with brandy, one jar with both, and then finally a few jars with shredded quince and rum (leaving out the sugar and spices on the theory that rum has quite a nice flavour of its own to impart). The jars are now nestled in the fridge infusing away.

This is all in an attempt to use up the last of the quince, of course. We're really not very big drinkers, and when we do drink it's usually a glass of wine rather than hard liquor. So the fact that we have twelve quart jars full of liquor is kind of amusing.

When we got the quart jars, we also got some half-pints, so I'll be spending some time very soon making quince jelly, as well. Or anything to use up the rest of the quince, which have been sitting in a bucket in the dining room for months now.

# Posted by ayse on 12/06/08 at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)