Wild Crabapple Jelly

On a recent walk, we noticed a couple of wild crabapple trees loaded with sunset-colored fruits. This year is a good year for apples of all kinds, it seems, wild and otherwise. Tim and I carried along some bags, and picked a buttload. We must have carried almost 10 pounds of these little things home.

I had made crabapple jelly before out of these, and it was OK. This year I decided to find a way of making it without so incredibly much sugar. It's been three years since I've made jam or jelly (because we have so much around the house). I'm sure no-sugar pectin was around back then, but don't ask me why I haven't tried making lower sugar jam before now. That's how I should have been doing it all along. When you see traditional recipes with regular pectin that call for MORE SUGAR than fruit...something just doesn't seem right.

The problem is for jellies and jams to set properly you need the right balance of acid and sugar with the pectin. And we're talking a LOT of sugar. I did some reading about low methoxyl pectin, and a whole lot of other stuff. Then I went to the new WalMart in Hartland (yes, I do occasionally shop at Wally World. You can't argue with their low prices, and they have stuff other stores don't. Like the beef back ribs we are going to smoke tomorrow, and if I wanted to make our own smoked beef tongue, they actually have beef tongues). I found Ball's No Sugar Needed pectin, which lets you add anywhere from 0 to 3 cups of sugar per batch, as well as any other sweetener you like, including honey.

The yield is a lot less (obviously), but the tart flavor blows the regular way out of the water. I think this is the way I'm going to make jam and jelly all the time from now on. It actually tastes like the fruit, instead of fruit-flavored candy.

It was a lot of work to trim and cut all those little apples, and I got the juice in stages by letting the cooked pulp drain overnight twice. I used a few regular-sized wild apples, I added the juice of two lemons to the whole mess, and I used a Woodchuck Hard Cider to help rinse out more apple goodness. I figured that certainly couldn't hurt. I ended up with 8 cups of pink apple juice. I used a mere half cup sugar for each 4-cup batch.

Even though it's cloudy, I thought the color turned out prettier than the batch I made three years ago, too. The pic is a bitmap because Paint won't save anything you edit any other way (Why? Help? How do I change the default edit program?), but I decided I liked it anyway.