How to make 3 berries jelly

One of my favourite things to do each summer is to make the jelly, we eat with so much pleasure all winter long. To me this is a savoury recipe, since I only ever have it with meat and potatoes. I'm salivating just from the thought of it. Well, then let's move on to the recipe, shall we?!

You'll need

Berries

Sugar

2 large pots

1 colander

cheese cloth

1 ladle

1 skimmer

1 tea towel

an abundance of glasses

a bit of whiskey or atamon

Day 1 

Day 1 should be long before your gooseberries are ripe. Our gooseberries are red, so we make our jelly no later than when they begin to show the first signs of turning from green to red. 

Pluck all your berries, we do a 3 berries jelly, hence the name, since we happen to have a tiny bush of each in my parents' garden. The majority of our berries are gooseberries, and then there are much smaller amounts of red currants and black currants. Watch out for those pesky thorns on the gooseberries. While you want to avoid all the leaves, the stems of the berries can remain on if you have, ahem, sloppy pickers. 

Once you have thoroughly cleaned all the berries in water to get any bugs etc. off, it is time to cook them.

Place the berries in a large pot and cover about 1/3 of the berries with water. Let it boil for 30 min.

Place the cheese cloth in the colander and place the colander on top of a pot large enough to hold all the juice. 

Now comes the immensely important part: let the juice drip overnight. Why? Because the very last of that juice is the juice that contains the most pectin, which is what makes jelly gelatinous. 

 Day 2

You did wait a day didn't you?! Well then, let's get on with the jelly making.

First you need to measure your juice. For every litre of juice you'll need a kilo of sugar. Yes, you read that right, one to one and don't try to save on the sugar as it a) makes it delicious and b) conserves it. Do not add the sugar yet.

Find all your jelly glasses and sanitise them using boiling water and atamon or my personal favourite, whiskey. 

Now bring the juice to a boil and skim off all the white foam that surfaces. This foam contains the impurities of the juice and you want to get rid of as much of it as possible. 

When you have removed all the foam, take the pot of the heat and add the sugar. Gently stir it till all the sugar is dissolved. 

Return the pot to the heat and let it boil again. If any foam surfaces, then skim it off. The juice now needs to boil until it reached the jelly state. Don't worry if you don't know when that is, because there is a nifty trick to find out. 

The jelly test

To find out if the juice is at the jelly stage, take a room temperatured spoon, dip it in, raise it high above the pot and let the juice drip off. If the last drop remains on your spoon as jelly, well then you have jelly. 

Ladle the jelly into the glasses and let the glasses cool completely covered by a tea towel. 

Put the lids on the glasses, once the jelly has cooled off completely. Store them in a cold, dark place.