Rosehip & Apple Jelly

This year has seen a bumper crop of wild berries and fruits.  Perfect for an avid forager.  The rosehips looked especially tempting being fat and glossy red.  I have never tried eating them before but was very tempted by the idea of making some Rosehip jelly, the perfect accompaniment for game after-all.  The BBC GoodFood website provided me with a brilliant recipe for Rosehip & Crabapple Jelly.   I didn't have access to any crabapples at the time but I do have a dessert apple tree in the garden which had dropped plenty of small windfalls that I was able to use instead.

Picking the rosehips was easy enough although I had left it a little late so many were beginning to go over making this a rather sticky affair even though I avoided the squishy ones.  Once I got them home I went through them picking off any bits of stalk and then gave them a good wash as directed in the recipe.  Then it was into a pan with plenty of water to be boiled up for 45 minutes.
Now I could turn my attention to the apples.  They just needed to be cored and roughly chopped.  The crabapples were supposed to be quartered so as my apples were larger I cut mine into 1/8ths.

After 45 minutes the apples could also be added to the pan for a further 15 minutes of cooking.  In order to get maximum juice out of my fruit, I then decided to break everything up a bit with a potato masher before ladling it all into a jelly bag.  You will need a large jelly bag.  Mine wasn't really big enough so it took me a little while to manage to squeeze everything in.  The recipe states you should now leave it to drain overnight but I found that after hanging for a couple of hours nothing much more was going to come out naturally so I proceeded to squeeze it wearing some clean rubber gloves to manually 'milk' the remaining juice.  This last bit was particularly thick and syrupy so I figured it was going to add greatly to the flavour.

Now you add the sugar, lemon juice and honey (not sure how much impact the small quantity of honey has but I added it anyway).  I sliced the lemon rind up really fine as if I was making marmalade as I figured the extra tang would work well when serving this with meat.  In the recipe, it just tells you to pare the rind in thick slices so it can be removed after but I think my way is better.  Make sure you are using a large pan now, preferably a jam pan, with plenty of room to prevent the jelly from boiling over which can happen very quickly.

Setting point took a lot longer to reach than stated in the recipe and it actually needed to get to 106ºc on my thermometer, a degree above normal setting point, which might have been down to using eating apples rather than crabapples I suppose.  during this time I was constantly stirring it to stop it sticking and burning on the bottom of the pan.  It was all worth it though and I ended up with 1.1kg of jelly which tasted divine.  I had some on a cracker spread with Philadelphia.  Just too good.