When I took my first home food preservation workshop, I was surprised at the simplicity of home canning. Most regularly used recipes are easy to follow, have only a few ingredients and all follow the same processing steps. I was hooked as they say. If you ask my wife, she will tell you that I am at my quietest when I am preserving. Since my first workshop, our household has not purchased jelly or jam from a store. Why buy a commercial product when you can make one at home, especially if you have the time?
As a group, we have made many jellies from commercial juice. In my first class, we made a red wine jelly. At home I made red wine jelly using a friend's wine he had made. It had great taste as wine and the taste of the fruit was evident in my jelly.
Our friends, the Master Gardeners of San Joaquin County, were having an Open Garden Day event (pre-Covid). It's a great event highlighting the demo gardens at the San Joaquin Ag Center, classes on gardening practices, tool sharpening, and much more. We Master Food Preservers were invited to set up a booth outside and show what we could do. So, we took on the task of making jars of jelly using commercial fruit juice. Most recipes call for a quantity of juice, and most often home preservers make their own juice from the freshest picked fruit they can find.
We did not have the time to make the juice and then make the jelly at this open garden event and therefore decided to use the purest 100% fruit juice we could find. We found a 32 ounce, organic, 100% fruit juice for around $8.00. Perfect for our task at hand.
We chose to do a low sugar with added pectin recipe for our jelly. The approved recipes can be found on the enclosed information flyer that comes with your pectin. If you are using a bulk pectin, there is also information about quantities of pectin to use on the container. Ball preserving has a page for calculating the amount of pectin to use in your recipe.
For the next four hours we made two batches of jelly from commercial juice. If you use the 100% no added sugar type, it saves you the time and mess of making your own juice from fruit. Although juice made from same day picked fruit is the best!
It's easy to see how much healthier your homemade low sugar jelly can be. No need to read store labels for high fructose corn syrup, or sugar, or cane sugar or any type of sweetener. No need to search the store shelves for the best jelly on sale. How long would 4 jars of jelly last in your home?
Now let's look at the economics, which is what I started to do… Let's not count the cost of the jar, because the jar and ring can be reused (you do need new lids) and factoring the depreciating cost of a jar over multiple uses, not necessary.
Depending on the brand of juice changes your cost. But let's use my $8.00 32-ounce bottle. The recipe calls for 4 ½ cups of sugar, that equals $1.31. The low sugar pectin from your local supermarket might be $5.00 ish. Add it all up to a total of $14.31 divided by 4 gives you a per jar cost of $3.58. That's much less than the $4.50 to $5.50 you might pay at the store.
Economically you can save money by preserving you own jams and jellies and think of the family fun you can have in the process.
Our Master Food Preserver group is having a workshop on March 19, 2022 on the topic of making jelly from commercial juice. The workshop will be via Zoom starting at 10 a.m. Please tune in to our Facebook page for information about registering for this free workshop.
Here are a few additional link to the National Center for Home Food Preservation about jams and jellies:
Making jams and jellies: Jellied product ingredients
Making jams and jellies with added pectin
See you on March 19!