{"id":881,"date":"2014-09-26T09:56:49","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T14:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/?p=881"},"modified":"2014-09-26T09:56:49","modified_gmt":"2014-09-26T14:56:49","slug":"muscadine-jelly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/26\/muscadine-jelly\/","title":{"rendered":"Muscadine Jelly"},"content":{"rendered":"

A small section of our backyard was left in a \u201cnatural\u201d state. We call it our back forty. It contains a few pine trees, a hickory nut tree, oak trees, some other scrubby trees and muscadine vines. Every few years the vines produce enough muscadines to make jelly. This was one of those years.<\/p>\n

When I was growing up, we would go to the mountains near our home in Yell County and pick muscadines each fall. Mama would make jelly. Ann had a similar experience picking muscadines near Mountain View. In addition to making jelly, her mother would can the muscadine juice and store it in the storm cellar.<\/p>\n

The muscadine vines grow high into the trees\u2014too high for us to reach. I stood on a ladder to reach some, but we mostly stood on the ground.<\/p>\n

\"Muscadine49\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Muscadine53\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Muscadine58\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We picked about 10 cups\u2014more than enough to make a batch of jelly.<\/p>\n

\"Muscadine01\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We measured out 8 cups of muscadines, washed them and cooked them for a while in a little water. While they were cooking, I used a potato masher to crush the muscadines.<\/p>\n

\"Muscadine0\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After the muscadines had simmered for several minutes and were all crushed, I strained the juice through cheesecloth. The concoction didn’t strain very quickly or easily but after a bit of squeezing and mashing on the cheesecloth, we extracted about 5 cups of juice.<\/p>\n

\"Muscadine3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Our jelly had three main ingredients\u2014juice, sugar, and pectin. We followed the recipe for grape jelly that came with the pectin. We added 7 cups of sugar and one packet of fruit pectin to the 5 cups of juice.<\/p>\n

\"Muscadine5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We brought the juice and pectin to a boil and added the sugar. We added a pat of butter to inhibit foaming. \u00a0We boiled juice for one minute after it came to a boil again.<\/p>\n

\"Muscadine9\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We sterilized the jars in a big pot of boiling water.<\/p>\n

\"Muscadine6\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We ladled the hot jelly into jars and sealed the tops.<\/p>\n

\"Muscadine11\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The jelly is good! \u00a0It tastes just like the jelly Mama used to make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A small section of our backyard was left in a \u201cnatural\u201d state. We call it our back forty. It contains a few pine trees, a hickory nut tree, oak trees, some other scrubby trees and muscadine vines. Every few years the vines produce enough muscadines to make jelly. This was one of those years. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3qUzP-ed","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":896,"href":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions\/896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sunlightbay.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}