Blackcurrant Jelly Recipe | How to Make Blackcurrant Jelly

This blackcurrant jelly recipe can apply to all berries such as red, white and black currants, gooseberries and indeed now sea buckthorn. A word of warning however, it does not apply, perversely enough, to nearly all fruits that are suffixed by berry, i.e. straw, black, rasp, logan and so on. The rule is if its round it will work with this blackcurrant jelly recipe if its all knobbly it wont! The other wonderful thing about all these fruits when used in this lbackcurrant jelly recipe is that you need very little of the actual fruit. It is perfectly possible, I know because I do it, to have a single small blacurrant bush in your garden to supply you and your extended family with a whole year's worth of blackcurrant jelly. Blackcurrant Jelly Recipe Ingredients: ■1 Kg Fruit ■500ml Water ■1.2 Kg Sugar To Prepare Blackcurrant Jelly Recipe 1.Boil the fruit in the water for as little time as possible to make sure it has turned to a pulp. The longer you boil it the more flavour you will lose. Sea buckthorn takes probably only 10 minutes, but blackcurrants can take up to 30 minutes. It all depends on the thickness of the skin and the density of the flesh. Just make sure the fruit is boil down to a soft mush. For this stage also ensure the saucepan is covered to avoid evaporation. 2.Give the mixture a good mashing to extract the most from the fruit and allow to cool for handling. If you are unsure of the pectin levels in the fruit, it is at this stage you should perform a pectin test. Sieve either through muslin if you want a clear "horticultural show quality" jelly or through a kitchen sieve if you just want to eat it and don't want to hang around all night waiting for it to go through the blessed muslin. You can guess which method I advocate! 3.Pour the extracted juice into a jam kettle, add the sugar and boil vigorously for 5 minutes. The sign that all is well is if the mixture takes on a foaming boil and you have trouble containing it in the kettle. If it boils just like water then add another 250g of sugar and bring back to the boil quickly, this should cure the problem. Test for set of the jelly by pouring a small amount from your stirring spoon onto a cool saucer. Leave the dollop on the saucer for a couple of minutes and see if it is skinning over when you push it around. If not boil a little longer and test again. Word of warning don't let the jelly start to set up in the saucepan and then reheat it. Keep it good and liquid over a low heat while testing. 4.Once you have the set you require which should be a doddle with these kinds of fruits decant into sterile jars. QED! I can tell you the resulting jelly from this blackcurrant jelly recipe will be out of this world. It won't have been all over boiled and lost its fresh flavour and the set should be good and strong. Blackcurrant is my favourite, but I have to say the sea buckthorn is well worth a try; it's not really a jelly for putting on toast, the flavour is just to intense and sweety like. But served up on some good quality Cornish ice cream -- heaven!