I don't have a lot of foraging opportunities on my property. We don't have a ton of acreage, and our animals free-range frequently, so they pretty much forage the crap out of it.

I have never made jelly before. At all. Much less with wild-grapes. My kids and I picked an ice-cream bucket full of tiny grapes, and I came home and looked up jelly recipes.

They almost all called for store-bought fruit pectin! I did not want to put store bought pectin into my lovely wild-grapes!

Surely they would have enough natural pectin just within the fruits, and the skins especially, right?!

I did lots of reading, and finally decided to just experiment. What I came up with is the result of a lot of website browsing and researching. I can't really credit any one person, so I'll just say, thanks people of the internet! You have given me a jumping-off point in my jelly-journey!

First of all, of course, we removed all stems and leaves, and cleaned those grapes up! Lots of rinsing until the water came off clean. Then we dumped about 3/4 cup of unrefined sugar into them, mixed them up, and put them in the fridge overnight. This may or may not make any difference, but some random internet people were recommending doing this to release more juices.
 

 
The next day, we put our saucepan of grapes on the stove and brought them to a simmer. I added about a quarter cup of water, just to make sure there was enough liquid, and squished and stirred occasionally, to prevent sticking and to help release juices.
 

 
I cooked them for about 30 minutes, then dipped a cold spoon into the sauce to test the mixture's consistency and flavor. I found it thinner than I wanted, and too sour, so I added another half-cup of sugar and simmered for another 15min.
 

 
I tried the cold spoon trick again and found the taste to be much better, and the mixture thicker. I knew it would thicken as it cooled, so I decided to move on to the next step: straining!
 

 
I used my old-and-breaking-but-tried-and-true metal strainer. The key is to make sure the holes are smaller than grape seeds. In my case, they were. I put the strainer over my pyrex measuring cup and then slowly dumped the hot sauce into the strainer.
 

I used my rubber spatula to squish and smear the grape pulp around, to make sure all the goodness went into the cup.

After lots of squishing, I ended up with a blob of skins and seeds. I try not to waste anything, so this was fed to the chickens!

After all that, I had about a cup of jelly!

Time to put it into a jar and pop it in the fridge to cool and thicken. Would it gel without additional pectin?

Well, we let it sit in the fridge all day, and in the evening, we had to taste it!!

The great jelly experiment was declared a success! They LOVED it and proceeded to eat up half of what we had made...

The jelly gelled wonderfully! It was still more sour than the jelly we are used to, but we enjoyed it that way.

Sort of reminiscent of grape Jolly Ranchers... It also reminded me a little of homemade cranberry sauce. Next time I will probably add a little more sugar, but not too much.

Thanks for reading! I hope you all enjoyed our little experiment and perhaps found it helpful. ♥ Have a lovely week!!

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