Sterling Adventures

Making home made redcurrant jelly; we’ve got an enormous red currant bush in out garden and this year it’s produced a bumper crop! It may well have done better in previous years if we’d realised that the fruit comes on last year’s wood, not the fresh green stems of the current year. So an important note there for pruning the bush – leave what growth you can, while still keeping the size of the bush manageable, from this year’s growing season to provide one-year-old stems for next year’s crop…

As you should be able to guess, the redcurrant season is over and I made this a while ago. I’m already starting to think of sloes, and I remembered I hadn’t blogged my redcurrant efforts.

Ingredients

• Large, juicy redcurrants (or redcurrants and white currants)
• Sugar (1kg / litre of juice extract, see method)

Method

1. Remove the leaves and the larger stems, and wash the fruit if necessary.
2. Put the fruit in a preserving pan, without any water, and heat very gently for about 45 minutes or until the currants are softened and well cooked.
3. Mash, then strain the pulp through a scalded jelly bag.
4. Leave it to drip for at least 1 hour.
5. Measure the extract, and return it to the cleaned pan.
6. Add 1 kg sugar for each litre of extract.
7. Bring to the boil, stirring all the time. Then boil, without stirring, for 1 further minute.
8. Skim the jelly quickly, and immediately pour it into warmed jars, before it has a chance to set in the pan.
9. Cover and label.

This recipe was inspired by the one found on Cook it Simply, although I have changed it a bit. For example, adding an extra pint of water to the mashed pulp to get a bit extra from the berries… The pulp was still oozing with flavour, so I had to find a way to get a bit more juice out of the berries!

Now I have lots of jars of redcurrant jelly to get through….