Rosehip Jelly

In our communal garden last weekend. Mouseover for more.

1. At the end of summer, go down to where the wild roses grow. Step over the bodies of any Aussie pop singers.
2. Pick rosehips by snapping them carefully off the ends of their stalks, watching out for branches springing back.
3. Even if you watch out, you will get pricked by thorns. Make sure your tetanus shots are up-to-date. Thick garden gloves are annoying and no guarantee.
4. There will be spiders.
5. Pick as many as you can, aiming for ones that aren’t overripe. I picked about 1.2kg in two batches, which took about two hours in total.
6. Back in the kitchen, rinse and drain them, then trim them with a knife and chopping board. This will take ages, but who wants those furry black bits in their jelly? Trim any remaining stalks, too.
7. Put them in a large clean saucepan and add about half their volume in water. (Not a quarter, as my old cookbook says.)
8. Simmer until soft. Using a potato masher can help this along.
9. Drape a clean muslin cloth across your biggest bowl, and carefully empty the suacepan’s contents into it.
10. Bring up the edges of the cloth in two parts and tie into a fat knot. Find somewhere you can suspend this rosehip lump above the bowl by tying it onto something. I used a cupboard handle.
11. Leave to drain, preferably overnight.
12. If you had used only a quarter of their volume in water, you would have ended up with a pathetic 200ml of juice, in which case reboiling in a fresh quarter-ish-amount of water and re-straining would be in order. Hopefully your half-volume went better.
13. Wash and rinse 4 or 5 jam jars and their lids. I use Bonne Maman jars because they have nice wide openings. The lids should be the metal ones with those rubber seals inside the rim. Dry the lids carefully with a clean towel. Dry the jars thoroughly by heating them on a tray in the oven.
14. Put a small dish in the freezer.
15. Measure the final amount of juice in a jug. I had 650ml. Pour it into a clean large saucepan. Use spatulas on bowl and jug to get every last bit.
16. Add caster sugar in a juice-to-sugar ratio of 1.25l to 1kg (equivalent to 1 pint to 1 pound). My 650ml meant 520g of sugar.
17. If you are wise, add 50g of pectin powder (Jamsetta, as Australians know it) or equivalent per kg of sugar.
18. Stir with a wooden spoon, then heat the saucepan gradually until sugar dissolves.
19. Turn up the heat until boiling, then turn down to keep it on a rolling boil for ten minutes or so.
20. You can skim off any whitish froth as it boils, but there’s really no need, it all rises to the top of the jar.
21. Take out a small amount with a teaspoon and drip onto your dish from the freezer; if it sets, it’s ready. If not, boil another 5 minutes.
22. When it’s ready, take your tray of jars out of the oven and set on a heatproof surface. Carefully pour the mixture into jars, up to about a centimetre from the top. Mine filled three.
23. Hold each jar in turn with an oven-mitted hand and put on their lids tightly with your other. Leave to stand.
24. At some point in the next hour or two you’ll hear the jar lids pop as they seal. If any don’t, they didn’t seal properly; eat this jelly first.
25. The next morning, admire your new jars of jelly and how the contents don’t move when you tilt them over. If they don’t, well done.
26. If the contents do move, open one.
27. If the contents are like honey instead of jelly, kick yourself for not including step 17.
28. Empty all the jars back into the saucepan, scraping out as much as you can with a spatula.
29. Add the Jamsetta like you should have in the first place and reboil. Meanwhile, clean and rinse the jars and heat them again in the oven to dry.
30. Test the jelly as before; it should be okay after 10 minutes.
31. Take the jars out of the oven and pour in the jelly as before.
32. As the surface water in the jars didn’t have time to evaporate fully, the jelly will now become a frothing, boiling monster, and two of the three jars will boil over.
33. When it settles down, you will be left with one full and two half-full jars; consolidate the latter to one jar. Try to clean the lip of the jar with a paper towel.
34. Add lids and wait for them to seal. The boiled-over one won’t, so that goes into current circulation.
35. Keep forgetting to find a label for the one jar that’s going to the back of the cupboard.

We’ve had better luck with quince and crabapple jelly, both excellent, and rosehip syrup is also good, particularly as a placebo for toddlers demanding medicine. But rosehip jelly is still worth trying.

26 September 2010 · Whatever

Added by Rory on 29 September 2010.