“I beg your pardon?”
“I said…I’m going to Christina’s to pick up a bag of apple cores and peels…”
It’s lucky that my husband knows me well enough to take these sorts of comments in his stride. Christina was making apple pie and I’d asked her to keep the leftover bits and pieces for me. I know it sounds ridiculously frugal, but apple cores and peel make fantastic pectin and I religiously save and freeze the cores from Small Man’s morning and afternoon teas. I’d been at it for a couple of weeks and was accumulating a tidy collection, when Chris mentioned her pie. I arrived with a plate of vanilla kifli and offered to trade for her bag of “compost bits”. No wonder people think I’m strange.
In total, I had a dozen frozen Fuji cores, a full bag of green apple peel and cores from Christina, and the peel and cores from another six Fujis that needed to be eaten (I cooked the pulp into pie filling and stashed it in the freezer). It made the most gorgeous pectin (instructions here), as well as some delicious apple jelly.
Apple jelly is pretty easy to make – it’s what you end up with if you add sugar to your homemade pectin. After I’d let the liquid drain through the calico (without pressing – that’s very important, or you’ll get cloudy jelly), I measured out a litre of the drained apple stock. This was poured into a large saucepan and brought to a boil, then the juice of a lemon and four cups of sugar were added (the ratio is one cup of sugar to each cup of apple stock – sometimes you can get away with a little less, but if there isn’t enough sugar, the jelly might not set).
The pot was brought to a rolling boil until it reached 220F (104.5C) on a candy thermometer. It really doesn’t set until it gets to that temperature, but if you don’t have a thermometer, you can always check if it’s ready by putting a small blob of jelly onto a cold plate to see if it wrinkles. There is always some froth on the top of the liquid as it boils – that’s a good sign that the pectin is setting – just skim it off carefully and discard.
Once it was ready, we poured the hot jelly into sterilised jars and sealed. We boiled the finished jars in a hot water bath for 10 minutes, just to make doubly sure they won’t go mouldy.
We ended up with three large jars of pectin and four jars of apple jelly. I took two jars of jelly to Christina’s house – one for her and one for her dad (after all, it was his green apples). Her brother opened the door and looked at me quizzically as I handed him the jars and said…
“This is for Christina – it’s Compost Jelly”.
. . . . .
Edit: I’ve just had an email from a lady who had trouble getting the apple jelly to set. This was the original YouTube video we learnt to make the apple jelly from – I thought it might be useful to link it here:
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
Hi Celia,
I just wanted to say how much I’m enjoying your blog, having stumbled across it this morning via David Lebovitz and his CWC! I am relatively new to the world of food blogs, but they are a wonderful way to while away the hours whilst nursing my new baby! I’m only a little way through your archive and have already come across so many ideas I want to try out. This apple jelly from leftover cores and peel sounds just wonderful! Unfortunately my husband eats the whole apple, core and all, so it may take me a while to save up enough. On the other hand, I imagine I could use some of the early windfalls from my little apple trees – I hate seeing them go to waste!
Looking forward very much to reading the rest of what you’ve written so far, and to what is yet to come! Thank you!
Hi Julia
Congratulations on your new baby! I used to watch endless David Attenborough videos when I was nursing.. :)
Thanks for taking the time to read the blog – I love writing it, and it’s so rewarding to know people are reading it. When you say “little apple trees”, do you mean small trees, or crabapple trees? Oh, how I’d love to have a crabapple tree that fruits – ours won’t in Sydney’s climate. Last year a friend gave us crabapples, and it makes the most wonderful jelly…
Cheers, Celia
Hi Celia
It is apple time here now, and plum time and the elderberries are ripening and the rowan berries and I am just going to go out with the dogs to get some blackberries. Think there are going to be masses this year here. I found a recipe in a River Cottage book called Preserves for compost jelly which involves using whatever citrus peels you have to hand as well as your apple scrap collection to get a citrussy jelly for when you have run out of marmalade. I haven’t tried it yet but it sounds like a good idea?
Joanna
Hi Joanna
I’m so inspired by that book! It’s fabulous, even though we don’t have your hedgerow fruits here in Oz. We’ve never used citrus scraps, but I think it sounds like a brilliant idea. Our compost jelly is based on apple jelly, but I just love the idea of using up all the scrap that we might otherwise throw away. With all the pectin from the apple scraps plus the citrus seeds and peel, the jelly should set really well.
Have a look at the onion marmalade recipe in that book as well; it’s a winner. My recipe is a version of that, with locally available ingredients substituted for the ones I couldn’t get here.
As I type I have a big vat of pectin boiling – I’d saved four big plastic bags of apple leavings (cores and peel from apple pies and school lunches) in the freezer and was running out of room, so I took them all out today and boiled them up. It’s such an easy process, albeit time consuming.
Pete really likes making plum jam – it always sets so well because the plums have so much natural pectin. Are you planning on doing any jam making or preserving this year?
Celia
Hi Celia
You’re right it’s a great book, I only got it a few weeks ago. I am thinking about trying the hawthorn berry sauce…
How spooky, we are just about to make that onion marmalade only Brian doesn’t eat berries, currants, (allergy from growing up on a strawberry picking farm) so I think we are going to sub some lemon and lime marmalade for the red currant jelly element.
All over Bristol there are trees leaning over fences with fruits on them, pears, apples, crab appples and all sorts and no one seems to use them, I don’t understand. I have 8lbs of blackberries that I just picked while walking the dogs so will make jelly with them. I have a little apple tree in the garden with three grafts on it, a russet, a cooker and one which I don’t know what it is. Too much for one little tree really! I will go and take the windfalls and use them up in the jelly.
I like making plum jam too. We had a disaster one year when I made a dozen jars and they went to concrete. I am very careful now. I am also quite keen on chutneys, I think we eat more of those than the jams. The best one I ever made was with some fabulous organic apple balsamic vinegar and loads of apples from my neighbour’s old tree. She was throwing them away and I said I would have a few and ended up with a sackful…. but I haven’t really got the storage space… Have you ever made balsamic vinegar? I haven’t got a clue how that’s made. Joanna
Hi Joanna
I’m not sure about the lemon marmalade in the onion marmalade, you know. I’m not sure the flavours would work. I’ve used quince jelly with great success – can you get any of that? The onion marmalade is quite sweet, but we use it in savoury applications – with meats, cheeses etc. I think the jelly in it needs to be one that would work in that context, ie. a redcurrant or lillypilly or quince. Maybe apple jelly would work as well, as we often serve that with pork or cheese? Just my opinion, of course, and if you do use the lemon lime marmalade, I’d love to know how it goes. The recipe in the Preserves book is great, because it’s not too sweet. Most recipes I’d tried for onion marmalade before that had been almost sickly sweet.
8lb of blackberries! Wow, that’s fantastic! Did you know that here in Australia, they sell for up to $8 for a 150g punnet? 8lb would have cost nearly $200! Frozen are cheaper, but I’m sure they’re not as good. We’ve never made berry jelly, but Pete has made some wonderful berry jams. They needed quite a lot of pectin and acid to set, as the berries, particularly the sweeter ones, don’t seem to have a lot of either.
No idea at all how to make balsamic vinegar, sorry. We have made eggplant pickle, which is a type of chutney, as well as the onion marmalade and tomato relish.
Have a lovely day in old Bristol town! :)
Celia
The irony is that hardly anyone bothers to pick the free ones and they have a more complex taste than the commercial ones, as there are various different varieties and you can pick some a bit underipe to mix in, which gives more flavour too. This is a particularly good year for them. If you buy commercial blackberries they are probably about £1.50 for 150g in the shops here. I don’t know what mine would cost if I charged minimum wage for my picking time. I have finished bb jelly and jam making finally. Phew.
On the onion marmalade front : we didn’t use the lemon marmalade in the end, but a mild light orange one, and the results are looking good. I had a quick taste and I think it will be OK. Sweet, hint of orange , but not overwhelming, plus used apple balsamic vinegar, as well as the cider vinegar so more apple flavours than anything else. I’m afraid I don’t know what lily pilly is, though I do like quince jelly and that is a good thought! Thanks. Joanna
Orange sounds a much better match – for some reason when I hear lemon and lime I think of an ice-block (ice lolly). Your onion marmalade sounds delicious! Lilly pilly probably wouldn’t work for your husband, as it’s similar to redcurrant. It’s a native Australian berry which has been used for years in indigenous foods. You need to start a food blog as well, Joanna, because I desperately want to see photos of hedgerow fruits and blackberry jelly and the Bristol countryside.. :)
Celia
I will take some pictures next time I go out, or ask B who has the big fancy camera to do some nice blackberry hedgerow shots and post them on a photo site for you. :)
I would love to see them, Joanna! Please let me know…
Thanks, Celia
I meant to do the photos and then it rained a lot and then we went to Wales and now the remaining berries look a bit tired, sorry, I didn’t get back up to the blackberry hills in time.
I picked some elderberries and managed to make one small bottle of the elderberry sauce recipe at the end of the Pam Corbin book. Dark and spicy.. I’ll revisit it round Christmas when it might have calmed down a bit. The english plum season seemed to last about a week too (!) and I think the week when we can get cobnuts from the greengrocers has been and gone. My turkish brown fig tree managed to offer me about a dozen fully ripe figs this year (it’s just a baby) so I have scoffed the lot. I don’t think the second lot will ripen before the winter, they don’t usually in England. Winding down to autumn here….
No worries, Jo, I hope you had a nice time in Wales! Sounds like you had a short fruit season, although Autumn must be a glorious time in the hedgerows, if my old Wind in the Willows dvds are anything to go by.. :)
Cheers, Celia
I just read your article about blackberries. Here on the east coast of Vancouver Island, Himalayan blackberries grow like weeds. We have them on our boulevard, all 200 feet wide, on our 1/2 acre rural property. My husband built a wooden skywalk over top of the blackberries, as we live on the side of a hill and the juiciest berries seemed to always be the ones that were just out of arm’s reach! The skywalk is a beautiful walk in the summer underneath the canopy of blackberry vines, with the sweet smell of ripe blackberries in the air. My husband put rails around the skywalk, which makes it very safe to walk on.
It is important to let the blackberry ripen until it puffs out, otherwise it won’t be very sweet.
In early fall we can count on getting about 200 lbs. of blackberries. We make pies, vinegars, jams, jellies, crisps and often they go on top of our cereal for breakfast. We have a separate freezer only for blackberries and give lots away to friends, some of whom make wine and then give it back to us.
I am going to start saving my apple cores and peelings and make some pectin. Thanks for the recipe. I enjoy your blog.
Marguerite
Marguerite, thank you for taking the time to leave us such a lovely comment. 200lbs of blackberries!! How amazingly wonderful that would be! Your comment has made me want to eat them all over again – I’ll have to get some out of the freezer for dessert.. :)
Cheers, Celia
Just doing a bunch of reading on pectin and sources, and had a couple thoughts for your reader who had trouble with it setting
–different types of apples have more pectin thatn others. The source said Jonagold had most out of the different varieties, green types have more than red types, and underripe ones of any kind have most…
–apples out of season have been stored for a long time and have very little pectin left…along same lines overripe ones have almost none left.
–I thought I read somewhere that natural pectins may take a few days or weeks to set up? Not sure if my memory is correct.
Making a bunch of pectin up today, and adding the pits from a huge pot of plums. That info I got from this: http://www.celtnet.org.uk/articles/?a=view&p=printview-904 (it also contained the fascinating suggestion of adding a muslin bag of grated carrots to your fruit for added pectin!)
I plan to add the pectin I’m making today to the plums from the above pot to make a bunch of jam. Another time I might spice it up, this time I may add chopped cherries rescued from the recesses of the freezer.
REally enjoyed your posts on pectin and jams. Thank you!
I just wanted to let you know that your instructions to make apple jelly is a life saver. I got it in my head this year to bug my neighbours to pick apples from their trees and I ended up with about 30lb of crab & plain apples. I made and canned applesauce from the flesh, and now am making a batch of apple jelly from the peelings & cores. I froze the rest of the peelings I couldn’t process right now, but plan on making cranberry apple jelly. Next year I’ll try canning some apple pie filling, but will still know how to make apple jelly from the left overs thanks to you.
Take care…
Wonderful! Thanks for letting me know – so glad it worked well for you! Jelly can be fussy to set, but it sounds like your really fresh apples would have been full of pectin! :)
Celia,
If you want crab aples go for a nice drive to Terang in South-west Victoria in Autumn.They have crab apples as street trees there and council are always happy to see people pick them.
I have Hawthorn ,Lillypilly and three apple trees so am onto that pectin recipe as soon as they ripen too. I usually just thrown halved lemons then lift them out at the end of cooking for my pectin ‘fix”
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