I am totally making this. (Dandelion jelly)

[wtg]

@AndyD said in I am totally making this. (Dandelion jelly):

I'm a fan of all jams

As am I. Bonne Maman products go on sale at a local grocery store tomorrow. $2.99 a jar, which is a bargain. Time to stock up.

I'll be making red gooseberry jam and red currant jelly later this summer. Last year I made a gooseberry chutney which I wasn't thrilled with when I first tried it. We opened another jar last week to have with an Indian meal, and holy cow was it good. The flavors, the vinegar especially, mellowed and melded together very nicely.

[wtg]

@Jodi Would love to hear what you think after you've made it. I used to drink dandelion flower tea and thought it was quite tasty.

[AndyD]

@wtg
Yes stock up. Bonne Mason make great preserves, but are now pricey. I chanced upon a supermarket selling off jars of their bitter orange fine cut marmalade at £1.10 a jar, and scooped them all into my trolley.

Back home my wife was incredulous, "You bought so many jars of marmelade?" (It was more than a dozen )
My parents would make double that yearly from their raspberry crop.

[AndyD]

Sunday Times jam review

[Jodi]

“It feels like eating frogspawn”

Lol.

[wtg]

@AndyD

Unpleasant texture - it feels like eating frogspawn

I don't imagine the reviewer likes tapioca pudding either.

I bought blackcurrant jelly (the only Bonne Maman blackcurrant product at the store that was having the sale). Flavor is pretty good, perhaps a bit too sweet. I prefer jams and preserves to jellies, though.

Both my blackcurrant and redcurrant bushes have flowers!

[Jodi]

I like jam better than jelly too - though I made currant jelly from the bush in our yard, the one year that it had a ton of fruit - and it was delicious. Slightly off topic: I have since had to chop it to the ground, to try to rid it of the sawfly that was decimating its leaves every year - so I could expose all the soil around the base to winter weather to try to get rid of the insect - but I think I’ve also killed the currant, as there is no new growth. I had the same issue with my gooseberry bushes when we lived in Washington State. No way to kill the sawfly without super toxic chemicals that I didn’t want in my garden.

[wtg]

@Jodi said in I am totally making this. (Dandelion jelly):

I like jam better than jelly too - though I made currant jelly from the bush in our yard, the one year that it had a ton of fruit - and it was delicious

I always made jelly from the red currants, but a couple of years ago I decided to branch out. I tried recipes for red currant-strawberry and red currant-wild blueberry jams. I bought fresh strawberries at the grocery and the Wyman frozen wild blueberries from Costco. Both jams were delicious! Definitely need to cook the currants separately first and put them through a food mill. I didn't do that for the currant-strawberry jam and there were too many currant seeds.

to try to rid it of the sawfly that was decimating its leaves every year

I bought black currant bushes three years ago and they get infested with some kind of aphid every year. Happily neither the red currants nor the gooseberries have been stricken. This year I'm going to do a row cloth on the black currants after they set fruit and see if I can foil the aphids. If that doesn't work, I guess I'll be out there every day for a couple of weeks washing off the insects with the hose. Tedious, but it works.

The red currants in my yard have been getting a stem borer since my Dad first dug up a bush from his yard to gift me for my new yard back in the 1980s. I always get some volunteer shrubs popping up in the yard from seeds dropped by birds. I dig those up and nurture them till the parent bushes finally die from the borers, which takes many years. Cycle of red currant life!

[AndyD]

You are both so fortunate having fruit bushes, we've never owned a garden that gave enough fruit. I miss collecting from the mature quince tree just outside my old workplace.

If you have a Lidl nearby, on Thursday I found this on their shelves

Pear & cherry liquor jam. From Portugal and £2 a jar. Has lots of bits of fruit yet is fluid to spread.
Absolutely fabulous,
I'm going to another Lidl tomorrow to hunt for more!

[wtg]

@AndyD said in I am totally making this. (Dandelion jelly):

You are both so fortunate having fruit bushes, we've never owned a garden that gave enough fruit.

One mature red currant bush will make a couple of batches of jelly, probably 16 half-pint jars. If you add store bought (like the strawberries and blueberries I used), then of course you get even more.

I have two red gooseberry bushes. Last year was the second year I had them and they yielded 8 half pint jars of jam and 8 half pint jars of chutney.

The black currant bushes have not been nearly as prolific. A handful of berries to snack on. Hoping for better yields this year.

The jostaberry, a black currant/gooseberry cross, gave up about a dozen berries last year. A real disappointment.

Those preserves look nummy. I keep looking for Lidl stores but they're still only on the east coast here in the US, and I'm in the middle.

[AndyD]

Anyone made dandilion tea or jam yet?
Advice to give?
Two hours of picking heads resulted in (backache and) a couple of carrier bags each a quarter full

[Jodi]

Not yet. Barely lost the snow here. Though I did notice a couple of flowers this morning.

[Bernard]

I made violet jam one year. Not worth it, weak as water. My favorite jams to make are strawberry with local fresh picked fruit, and marmalades of any citrusy fruit. I never use as much sugar as called for, preferring sweet and tart. Most store bought is way too sweet for my taste.

Andy, I dyed wool with dandelion blossoms once. Processed it in a white enamel pot. More dye ended up staining the pot than got in the wool! I may have not mordanted correctly. Will try again some time.

[Jodi]

I adore marmalade.

[AndyD]

It's very different from picking and chopping quince for jam. Can be done by one but nice to have help.

1. concentrated dandelion pollen gives me mild hayfever/asthma
2. it becomes ever more difficult to strip the petals as the heads dry and close; pick the largest heads and pluck their petals on the same day. Pinching & rolling the green partbetween finger and thumb opens & loosens the flower...
3. a green lawn at the end of the day will be yellow again next morning

Now I need to buy pectin.

[AndyD]

A half carrier bag of head/petals makes 11 cups of (quite dark looking) juice. So we multiplied the online recipe by about 3.
2 bags of sugar (10 cups)
6 tablespoons of lemon
A bottle of the only pectin I could find

Roll boiled for about 10 mins, it seems nicely scented

When ladled out it filled 11 standard bottles of jam

Fingers crossed it sets nicely

[wtg]

That looks great! Can't wait to hear a report about how it tastes.

p.s. That's a very cool pan.

[AndyD]

It's a very hot pan!
Need a long jamming spoon to keep stirring hand at a distance because of the size, 16" Swan Brand, aluminium.

[Jodi]

Beautiful color!

[Bernard]

Looks nice. Curious to hear the taste verdict.