Pear jelly

[Mrs Ava]

Still working my way through the mountain of pears.  Yesterday and today I made pear jelly.  I filled my large pan with all the damaged or soft pears, put a lid on, over a low heat, and left to slowely cook down for about an hour.  After this I went in with my spud masher and really bashed the fruit mooosh around, then replaced the lid and gave it another 15 or so minutes.  I ADDED NO WATER AT ALL!

The resulting pulp was passed through a jelly bag which I squeezed to get maximum juice and flavour.  The resulting liquid was clear dark amber.

I had 4 pints of pure pear juice to which I warmed and added 4Ibs sugar and I boiled it and boiled it until it reached setting point.  Bottled, sealed and left to cool.

Low and behold, 8 jars of pear syrup!  So this evening I poured the syrup back into my pan, resterilised my jars and added the correct amount of powdered pectin to the liquid, brought to a rolling boil and cooked it for just 4 minutes.  Now have 7 jars of beautifully set pear jelly.  It is amazingly strong - I was very suprised.  It is incredibly pear flavoured and sweet, but not sugar sweet - overripe pear sweet if you catch my drift.

Still have 4 trays full of wrapped pears in the garage and one of my vegetable trays in the bottom of my fridge full of pears!

[Mrs Ava]

[triffid]

Sounds gorgeous!


So what are your plans for the rest of the pear mountain?  :D

[Carol]

Oh Emma thats sounds like  my idea of heaven,  pear jelly, I just love pears...  I didnt get one pear from my pear tree and not even a partridge..... ;D

[jennym]

Sounds good Emma, glad to hear that the pectin did the trick  :) - it's funny how much liquid is in pears, it really doesn't seem that way when you eat them fresh.

[Mrs Ava]

Well, mum has the first jar to try on her toast tomorrow.  I can't afford to open a jar just yet as we have about 10 different varieties of jam in the fridge, and the peanut butter, marmite, nutella and golden syrup in the cupboard!  I was amazed how much juice was produced Jen, more than apples have ever made!

As for the rest of the pears - I am hoping some store for Christmas as the rellies are coming to stay from Devon, and Grandad loves fresh fruit so it will be nice for mum to have a bowl full for him.  I am eating 2 a day, every day, now I am wondering about chutney......

[jennym]

Spiced pear relish?
Basically, just covered cut pieces of pear with water and cooked softly about 15 mins then made up a syrup with sugar to equal the weight of the water left, and added 10% vinegar and 5g allspice per 1000g pear weight.
Cooked very slowly for a long time (several hours as I was doing other things and just gave it the occasional stir) until pears were dark pink.
Brilliant with very strong cheese.