Concorde Grape Jelly

To Y

Jam making is not difficult, but it is hard to perfect. I had made apple jams, lemon and lime marmalade and blueberry jam previously, they turned out alright but I couldn't say they were very good. I didn't bother too much to perfect my technique as I don't eat jam often. But not this one. Y is a great fan of grape jelly. He particularly likes to spread plastic white bread with peanut butter and grape jelly. The problem is, grape jelly isn't available in the UK supermarkets, so we had to resort to ordering from an online British grocer which sells American foodstuff at £4 a jar! Then one day, I bought a kilo of super sweet South African black grapes in Costco, it suddenly dawned on me that I could use grapes to make jelly! But it was not exactly the quickest jam to make... It took a few hours for the boiled grape mixture to drip through a muslin bag to form grape juice (luckily this process didn't involve manual labour nor did it involve me looking at the mixture, otherwise I would have given up at this point). But the end product was so worth it, as it tasted exactly like Welch grape jelly! Now the jam jar has been scraped down to the bottom and it is time to make another batch! Being the clever, somewhat lazy, homemaker, I make the jelly with shop bought 100% grape juice this time! 20 minutes it's done! Voila!

Ingredients:

1. 325ml pure grape juice
2. 240g jam sugar
3. juice of half a lemon

Method:

• First, wash the jar and lid with warm soapy water. Dry it in a warm oven for about 20 minutes to sterilise the jar.
• Heat the grape juice, jam sugar and lemon juice in a pot. Stir to dissolve the jam sugar completely.
• If you have a food/jam therometer, when the temperature reaches 105c, the mixture has reached the setting point. If you don't have a food thermometer, put some saucers into the freezer for at least 10 minutes. When the mixture comes to a roaring boil, let it boil for a further 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, take out one saucer from the freezer and pour about a teaspoon of mixture onto the cold saucer. Run a finger through the jam. If the surface of the jelly wrinkles, it has reached the setting point. If not, continue to test at 3-minute intervals.
• Once the setting point is reached, turn off the heat and let the jam cool down for 15 minutes. Then, pour it into the hot sterilised jar, cover it straight away with a waxed disc. Store in the fridge when it has cooled down completely.