Quince and Grape Jam
We have a quince tree in the yard and although I did experiment with making a (pretty mediocre) BBQ sauce once, I haven't done much else. This year we seemed to have a bumper crop of fruit and I got it in my head to make quince jelly. Quince looks like a small apple or pear and before it's fully ripe is green with a tinge of pink, and once they ripen, they are yellow. Waiting for quince to ripen is an exercise in patience; it's takes until mid October or later where I live and if there is too hard a frost before you pick them, they can be ruined. I managed to pick them early-ish one morning right after a soft frost.
Quince are VERY tart! My original plan was to cook them down and make a jam with warm spices so that it would be reminiscent of apple butter but with Granny Smith apples.
2 days before I picked the quince, my friend Twila brings me a gallon freezer bag full of wild grape that she has growing. She came into work with a couple of bunches earlier in the fall. They were delicious and my comment was, "You are gong to preserve some right?" That was all the hint that she needed to deliver the last of the season's crop to me for preserving.
Before I finalized my plan of attack for the rabbit hole of fruit canning, my first order of business was to extract the grape juice. There is not an easier task. I washed the grapes on the vines in a colander and put them in a stockpot. I added just enough water to almost cover them, turned on the burner and covered them. Once they were at a slow boil I stirred a bit and employed my potato masher to 'smoosh' them a bit.
I lined a colander with cheesecloth and set it over a bowl. I spooned the grapes, seeds, vines -- everything into the cheese cloth and presses all the juice out of the mash and then poured the juice through another clean piece of cheese cloth. I have to tell you, I am a huge fan of kosher concord grape juice for its tartness and it took everything I had not to just bottle and drink the juice from these grapes.
After I harvested the quince, it came to me: instead of cooking the quince n water, why not use the grape juice as the base... A little Google search told me that others had done similar, so I set to it.
Quince -- even when ripe -- are hard to cut and coring them is almost impossible, so I just cut them in chunks and put them in the pot. The grape juice amounted to just about 4 cups which, serendipitously was just enough to barely cover the quince. Employing the same poach and strain method I boiled the quince until they were mushy and strained and pressed through first a wire mesh strainer, and then re-pressed the solids through cheese cloth to get every bit of the pulp that I could.
NOTE: For some added depth of flavor, I included some chopped fresh ginger, a couple of sticks of cinnamon, and a few whole cloves when I boiled the quince. When all was said and done, I had a beautiful tart fruit pulp to make my jam from.
On to the quince any grape jam: I use equal parts of granulated sugar to fruit pulp and in this case it was about 4 cups each, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, and about 1-1/2 ounce of liquid pectin. I probably could have even used less pectin since boiling the quince and grapes with their skins and seeds provides a good deal of natural pectin, but when the ingredients are not replaceable with a trip to the grocer, I take no chances.
After returning the pulp to the stockpot, I stirred in the sugar and lemon juice and once the sugar was all dissolved, brought it to a hard boil. In the meantime, my jars were in the dishwasher on a sanitizing cycle and the lids, rings and other equipment were boiling on the stove to sterilize.
In a small bowl, I whisked the liquid pectin with some of the pulp to insure that there were no lumps and once the jam was at that hard boil, I whisked in the pectin mixture and let it boil for exactly 1 minute before removing it from the heat.
If you want refrigerator jam without the boiling water bath for shelf-stable preservation, you can transfer the hot jam to containers for the refrigerator or freezing at this point. I opted to the boiling water bath for 10 minutes.
There is really no actual recipe to follow here, but I cooked each of the fruits in just enough liquid to cover them. Water, apple cider, and certainly the grape juice would all work fine for the cooking liquid..
Using a combination of wire mesh strainer and cheese cloth I pressed and squeezed all the pulp from the fruits.
Once the fruit juice and pulp was extracted, I combined equal parts of sugar to pulp and about a tablespoon of lemon juice for every 4 cups of jam.
After the jam was at a hard boil I whisked in about 2 tablespoons of pectin for every 4 cups of jam and let it boil for exactly 1 minute.
Thought for food: Assuming I have any left, I'll be using some of this jam in my Christmas Rugelach cookies.
