Wild Plum Jelly

Are you kidding me right now?  Jelly is time consuming.  Jelly is difficult.  OK, but jelly is also delicious!  My husband is a rural mail carrier and along his mail route are wild plum bushes.  And the plums are ripe and ready to be picked.  So he picked plums while I read all the recipes and procedures about jelly making that I could find.

Wash the plums and pick through them.  Discard any that are discolored, mushy, or otherwise not good.  Place the whole plums in a large dutch oven kettle and add 1/2 cup of water.  Bring to a boil then using a potato masher, smush--mash, the plums to get out pulp and juice.  Remove from the heat cover, and let it cool a bit.

Now to get just the clear juice out of this mix.  In order to do this, you need to construct a jelly strainer (jelly bag).  I sterilized a tea towel in boiling water, let it cool, then wrung out the water.  Turn a stool upside down, secure the tea towel with big rubber bands.  Place a bowl in the bottom and dump in the mushed plums--skins, pits and all.  This takes time, don't squeeze or press on the mixture, just let it drip.  This will ensure a clear juice for super pretty jelly.  Mine took a good eight hours.

For this recipe you need 4 cups of plum juice, 6 1/2 cups of sugar, and a pouch of Certo liquid pectin, to make seven cups of of jelly.  I followed the instructions for cooked jelly that came with the Certo product. The jelly needs to be processed in a water bath canner. Follow the instructions for water bath canning at:

Water Bath Canning - Simply Canning

www.simplycanning.com/water-bath-canning.html

Well worth the effort!  You might want to make a batch of homemade biscuits.

Enjoy friends!