Jelly

Making crab-apple jelly from some very yellow crab apples (probably(?) supposed to be that colour? ours were always red). The weird thing is that the juice still comes out pink, even though there was virtually no red tint in the original fruit!



From the first three pints of water plus apples, I got almost exactly three and a half pints of juice -- the extra presumably coming from the breakdown of the cell walls...

Edit: and from the second pint and a half, I got a pint and three quarters of juice.



I tried doing the forbidden and squeezing the bag to dry out the remaining pulp after it had finished dripping through, and got another half-pint of liquid out of it... but when I tried boiling this small quantity up with sugar, I accidentally caramelised the sugar and made boiled sweets instead! The liquid set rock-hard in the jar, and I had to reheat it over warm water so that I could induce it to flop out and roll it into a sausage between my hands to make 'apple drops' out of it :-p