too many grapes

About a week and a half ago, Whole Foods ran a one-day sale on organic grapes for 99 cents a pound. If you bought a case (18 lbs), the discount dropped to about 85 cents a pound. Of course, I bought a case. After getting all of those grapes home and realizing that just fitting them into my fridge was going to pose a challenge, I gave a few pounds away, juiced some (with our veggies) over the next few days, then tried to figure out what in the world I would do with the 10+ pounds of grapes that I still had.

And so I decided to use about 8 pounds of grapes to make jelly.  I've never made grape jelly before, but my kids do like the occasional jar they've had from the store. I had some pectin on hand, and a brand new juicer, and it seemed that this would be a good use of our remaining grapes.

After washing the grapes and pulling them from the stem, they more than filled my gallon bowl.

When I finished running them through the juicer, I had roughly 2 quarts of juice. In hindsight, the juicer isn't the most efficient way of juicing that many grapes, it wastes a good deal of the juice. But it was infinitely faster than running it through the food mill.

I wasn't quite prepared for how cloudy the jelly would be.  All of the grape jelly I've seen at the store has been clear and dark.  I guess they probably filter the juice before making it into jelly.  It tastes quite wonderful though, and it took very little sugar to make it nice and sweet. I just used the instructions that came with the Pomona pectin to make this batch, using the least amount of sugar they recommended.