Concord Grape Jam

On Wednesday, Bug and I participated in our first harvest with Portland Fruit Tree Project.  It was fun.  Our small group (8 or 9 of us all together) picked 92 lbs worth of green concord grapes.  This was quite the interesting task because the grape vines were growing on an arbor roof over a restaurant's outdoor dining area (there were no diners at the time).

The way PFTP works, is people volunteer to harvest from trees (or in this case vines) and half of what is harvested goes to the local food bank, and half gets split up between the harvesters.  It's a great project.  The trees belong to people who can't / don't want to harvest themselves.

So I got to bring home 7 lbs of green concord grapes.  But then I had to figure out what to do with the grapes.  We don't eat a lot of grapes here. 

Bug wanted to make them into raisins.  But they had seeds, so that wasn't going to work. (I am drying a few small ones that don't have seeds just for him though.)

So the next logical thing was jelly.  But I didn't have my steam juicer out of storage to make some nice pretty grape juice without all the work.

I then decided on jam.  I pulled the grapes off the stems and washed them.  Then I threw them into a pot and cooked them for about 10 minutes, giving them a smash with a potato masher a few times a lot, smashing grapes is fun!

After they had cooked and released all their juices, I pushed them through a sieve. I ended up with a disgusting looking puke-green juice with quite a bit of pulp.

At this point, I followed the directions on my packet of Pomona's Pectin.  I used 4 C of grape juice (with pulp) and 1 C of sugar.

It turned out much better than store-bought grape jelly.  Doesn't it always though?

my disgusting puke-green beautiful concord grape jam

This post linked at Food Renegade's Fight Back Friday.