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We recently picked a bunch of blackberries with the kids and put them to great use. We made Jam and Jelly. In this video, I'll show you how I make blackberry jelly that my kids love! I hope you enjoy it!
Here's a link (https://pantrypreparedness.com/how-to-make-and-can-blackberry-jelly/) to my website where I have a complete list of all of the equipment and ingredients you'll need to make this Jelly. Most of this stuff will get used for a lot of things if you plan to do canning!
Pantry Preparedness is a trademark of Income School LLC, an Idaho Limited Liability Company
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What's up my friends? Today I want to share with you how I make simple, easy
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blackberry jelly. Blackberries grow so well, at least here where I'm at in
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southern Idaho. We get a huge crop every single year. The kids love them, they'll
0:14
go out and pick them, but even so it feels like we don't make great use of them. So I've got a very simple recipe here that we love and that allows us to
0:23
be able to use that fruit all throughout the year. So without further ado, let's get started. I'll show you how to make blackberry jelly
0:31
I made some blackberry jam the other day and I made a video for you about it and
0:35
my wife reminded me that I should probably wear an apron when handling
0:40
berries, especially blackberries. They can stain clothes. So I am gonna put on
0:45
an apron today, although I will make note that I did not get any blackberry on my
0:51
shirt last time, so there's that. But still I'm gonna wear an apron today
0:56
Alright, so first things first, whenever we make jelly we start off by actually
1:00
making juice. That's where the jelly comes from. It actually doesn't contain
1:04
any of the fruit pulp at all. It contains the juice. So first things first, we're
1:10
gonna actually take our juicer here and we're gonna fill up the bottom of it
1:13
with water and get that heating up because we are gonna need that boiling really good here. Start with a swarm of water as the sink will give us. I'm gonna
1:20
fill it up basically to the top because over time this water as it boils is
1:26
gonna empty out and I'm gonna have to refill it probably a couple times
1:30
depending how much of my blackberry that I end up juicing today. So just the
1:36
higher I fill it, the less often I'm gonna have to refill it. Alright, now
1:40
that's nice and full. Set it on the stove and turn that all the way up to high
1:45
using full-size burner. What I'm using here is a standard steam juicer. So what
1:53
it's got here is in the bottom level it's got the water bath and in the next
1:57
level here, this is where we're actually gonna catch the juice from the berries
2:02
We use this for all sorts of stuff. We use this for apples to soften apples to
2:07
make applesauce and then we get a little bit of apple juice but then the apples
2:11
are softened. It's one way to do it. You can also just kind of boil the apples
2:15
in a little bit of water if you want to but this is the way my wife and I like
2:18
to do it and then we actually put the fruit in the top here to steam. We do the
2:23
same thing as well for grapes. We get some amazing grape juice that way. Next we're gonna want to go ahead and rinse off our fruit so it's in good shape to
2:31
go ahead and start juicing it. For our jelly we're gonna be using this Sure Gel
2:35
premium fruit pectin. I just buy lots of this so I sometimes will just find it at
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the store at a grocery store and just pick up basically as much as we can
2:45
because we use a bunch of boxes every year. Now according to the recipe in the
2:50
Sure Gel packet I'm gonna need 12 cups of fruit to yield my four and a half
2:56
cups of juice that I'm gonna need for this recipe. I'm curious to see how that
3:00
turns out so I'm gonna accurately measure my 12 cups and we're gonna see just how much juice we actually get. So first I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna
3:07
pour some of the juice that's in the bottom. I don't want to lose that when I
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rinse the fruit. This is all gonna get cooked it's gonna get hot. I'm not too
3:15
worried about it being like perfectly cleaned. I just want to make sure I get
3:18
off any like bugs or any other kind of dirt and stuff from when we picked these
3:24
the other day. So I'm just gonna quick give these a rinse. I don't want like
3:29
said I don't lose too much juice here. This is a four cup or a one quart
3:34
measuring cup. Just about there. A couple more. All right there's my first four
3:41
cups. I'm gonna just put this right in the top. Okay another four cups. There we
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go. Now I don't know about you but I find it awfully interesting that my four
3:57
quart slash one gallon ice cream bucket here it literally says right on it four
4:03
quarts. It's right there. Yielded only when it was full to the brim 12 cups
4:09
should be 16. So I'm a little bit suspect about the size of these containers. I
4:14
think I'm gonna go ahead and take a second because that's gonna take a few
4:18
minutes to heat up. I'm gonna measure water going into these this bucket and
4:24
see if it actually is four quarts. So I'm coming for you
4:27
Winco. Put the lid on that so we trap in that heat better. And this part when it
4:31
comes to the juicing is just a matter of just waiting now. We're gonna go ahead
4:35
and let that boil. If it starts boiling real hard we might turn down the
4:39
temperature just a little bit but keep it I still want to keep it boiling
4:43
pretty good and hard the whole time. All right here we go. Now we're gonna see
4:47
my super scientific testing for you. Four cups. Okay 12 cups. That's awfully
5:03
full. I'll see if it'll even fit another four. Probably gonna overflow here. Okay
5:11
it's four cups right there. Oh barely. Okay if they're filling their ice cream literally to the tippy top
5:22
then I'll give it to them. So I guess it must have just been that as we filled
5:27
them with blackberries the way the packing shape there was just more space
5:32
in it whereas now because they've been sitting for about a day and a half
5:35
they're just they've just kind of softened a bit. So they're taking up less
5:41
space now than they were then. So we'll see if that makes a big difference. Again
5:45
I put in what was originally about 16 cups but was only 12 cups when I
5:50
measured it today. I put it in there and we're gonna see if we get the four and
5:54
a half cups of yield that the recipe says I should probably get. All right Winco you're safe for now. Right now we're just gonna wait. So what will
6:01
happen we're gonna know we're getting there because this little hose is gonna
6:06
start to fill up with purple blackberry juice and as it does I'll be able to
6:12
open this up and let it through. Now it's just a waiting game. All right I've had
6:16
this going for a little while now and you can see we now have juice filling
6:20
the entire hose. So there are a few things I'm gonna go ahead and do at this
6:25
moment. First I'm actually gonna go ahead and I'm gonna turn on my oven to 220
6:30
degrees and then I'm gonna put some jars that I'm gonna be using for canning on a
6:34
baking tray and just put them in the oven. So I've got a tray in there
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actually with some jars in it from when I made my jam. So we'll just move this out of the way. This can hang it actually does a pretty good job of sealing. Okay
6:48
I'm gonna put a bunch of these jars in. For today I'm using these these are actually freezer safe jars. I'm not
7:00
making freezer jelly or freezer jam but I'm just using these jars they work
7:05
great as well. They kind of have this quilted pattern they're just nice but
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that's what I'm using for the jelly. You can go ahead and boil your jars. The
7:16
idea here is to have them sanitary for one and two to have them nice and hot when we put the hot jelly or jam or whatever into them. I like to have them
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hot it's it's a great way to make sure that we don't have any bacteria or anything else that can be growing inside. The reason 220 degrees that's
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above boiling point so essentially it's as good as or better than boiling them
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but I like having them good and dry when I pull them out of the oven. So they're
7:40
in there right now we'll let them get up to temperature. I'm gonna go ahead and
7:43
get the juice out of the juicer and we'll see how much we have. As it starts
7:48
to flow oftentimes it can take a little while to get all of it and we're gonna
7:53
see if we get the four and a half cups that the recipe says we should get from
7:58
the 12 cups. I will say that for the most part I found it to be pretty accurate
8:01
these numbers that they give but just in case. Go ahead and open that up. Let it
8:09
flow. As that slows down here I'll give this a little tip just to get the rest
8:15
of the juice to the front so it can pour out. Probably keep getting a little bit
8:18
over the next little while. I'm gonna see how that's doing. So to me these
8:24
blackberries here they look reasonably spent but there may be some more juice
8:29
in here. You can kind of press them and try to get a little bit more out but
8:34
then you're likely to also start pushing some of the pulp down through. I actually
8:39
think those are pretty good. See how much juice this is. Looking at the side of the
8:44
pitcher or the front of the pitcher almost six cups worth of juice out of that. That's pretty great. We got plenty of juice. Because I want to actually do a
8:51
double batch of the jelly I'm gonna go ahead and throw some more berries in here. I got plenty of water still in there you can see it's still mostly full
8:57
So what I'll do I'm gonna take this off. This is all my stuff from making the jam
9:01
the other the remains. I'm gonna go ahead and put this in here too and this will
9:06
all go in my compost. What was originally a gallon right with 12 cups of measured
9:10
gave me almost six cups. I need nine right so I need half of that again. So
9:19
I'm gonna get six more cups of blackberries go in here. Okay so I'm gonna let that juice and we'll go ahead and get started on the
9:37
next steps. All right so I'm gonna start getting stuff ready for the jelly as well as for canning. So one of the first things I'm gonna do is actually fill up
9:44
a small pot of water about halfway full with water. I'm gonna put that on the back
9:48
here to start start boiling. That's just on the back burner literally. The purpose
9:53
of this is for these lids. I like to boil the lids get them just on a small small
10:00
like light boil more of a simmer. So I'll just drop these in. If they stack
10:05
together sometimes the little magnet I use to pick them up will pick up more than one. So we'll go ahead and throw a few of these in. The purpose of this
10:14
again it sanitizes the inside of the lid but it also kind of softens that seal
10:18
making it so that it just seals really really well when the time comes. I've had
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these seals last for years and years even though they say they're guaranteed for up to 18 months. I've had them last way longer. I also don't worry too much about
10:28
if like how many I'm gonna use. I'd rather put a couple too many in there
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than not enough. I pull them out afterwards if I didn't use them I just
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put them back in a box and we're fine. The next thing I'm gonna do also is I'm
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gonna put my canning pot. I just use this stock pot here that's got a canning rack
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inside of it but I use that it's a little over half full. It's plenty full
10:50
to more than cover all the jars when I fill it up. But I'm gonna get that
10:54
boiling because we're gonna be ready to can probably by the time this is ready
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to boil. All right next thing we're now going to separate out the sugar that we
11:03
need. When we add in the majority of the sugar it's best to do that all at once
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not scoop by scoop. And since I'm doing a double batch here I'm gonna need six
11:12
cups of sugar. Then from that we're gonna need to set aside a little bit that we
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can mix in with our pectin. We're just gonna do that in a small bowl here. So
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this is that sure gel pectin that I showed you earlier. It's a quarter cup
11:28
per batch. So half a cup here in this case of sugar from the six cups that I
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set aside. So I'm taking a half a cup of that back out putting it into a little
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bowl. Shake the pectin down to the bottom. Open it up. Pour it into my bowl
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Grab my second pouch. Cool thing about pectin it's it's kind of interesting the
11:56
way that they do this is there are different strengths and different types of pectin. But when they package it up they package it such that one pack of
12:03
pectin always works with the same amount of fruit and sugar. So like if you use a
12:08
liquid pectin pack or something like that it it's usually like one package to
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however much sugar and however much fruit. The amount of sugar in fruit
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that's the thing that varies from from fruit to fruit. Some fruits have more
12:22
natural pectin in them and other fruits have less and so they need more. And so
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that that ratio is what matters. Berries all tend to be about the same but it's
12:32
gonna be different from berries to apricots to other things. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna take that mixture and I'm just gonna kind of stir it
12:39
together until it all kind of looks like one powder. All right the next thing that
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we're gonna do is we're actually gonna pour our juice into here. So as soon as
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our juice is all ready we'll pour it into here and we'll add our sugar and
12:51
pectin mixture while it's still cool. Well reasonably cool right? It's not
12:56
boiling hot at this point but it's warm from the steamer. We'll mix them together
13:01
really well in there and then I'll be done with the juicer. I'll be able to
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take that off the stove and replace it with this pot. And we're gonna heat it up
13:08
over high heat to where it's boiling really good. Solidly boiling. I'll show
13:13
you what that looks like when the time comes. Then we're gonna dump in all the rest of the sugar and stir that in till it's really good and mixed. Get it back
13:20
to a rolling boil. Once it's rolling we go for one more full minute and then
13:24
we're done. We're done making our jelly and we're ready to start the canning process. So let's go ahead and make that happen
13:32
Probably still get a little more juice over the next little bit but I think
13:35
that's more than enough. Actually that's almost exactly perfect. I'll go ahead and
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pour this into our liquid measuring cup just to be sure. For this I'm gonna be a
13:44
little more precise on the measuring. Eight cups. All right next we'll go ahead and we'll mix in this sugar
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and pectin mixture. We'll bring that over to the stove and heat that up
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Okay that mixed in really easily so now we've got the heat turned all the way up
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to high and we're gonna stir this basically constantly until it is boiling
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good and hard. Well that's getting going. Before it gets too hot I'm gonna move
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this table out of my way. For a complete list of everything you're gonna need to do what I'm doing here today just go over to pantrypreparedness.com. I'll put
14:37
a link in the description of this video as well as I'll pin it in a comment down below so you can see all the stuff you're gonna need to be able to do what
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we're doing today. One way I can tell we're getting there is I mean obviously I can see some boiling if I stop stirring but you can also see the foam
14:51
starting to form. If you're getting a lot of foam like this and it's bugging you that you have so much I mean you're gonna get some boiling here it's just
14:57
gonna happen but if you're getting a lot of foam you can put just a little bit of
15:03
margarine in there or butter and that will help. Anyway so now we've gone ahead
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and we've stirred in all the sugar at one time and now I need to stir really
15:13
good to make sure that I don't get any clumps. I want to get that all mixed in
15:18
really well and you notice that it stopped boiling so now we're gonna stir
15:24
until it comes back to a full rolling boil just like it was before and this
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time is gonna be a little fuller so hopefully we don't spill over. Alright that seems mixed in really well I'm not finding any more clumps. Oh there was one
15:38
I missed it that's why we keep stirring. We're about there. Yeah see that it's
15:45
boiling even while I'm stirring it. Alright we've gone for over a minute. Go ahead and put that there. We definitely
16:03
had a spill over. Before this cooks on I'm gonna try to get off what I can. Alright well we had a little bit spill
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over but not too bad we got to keep most of it. I'm gonna give it a little
16:18
stir. Next I like to lay out a towel to put jars on. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm
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gonna fill up these jars here in place. For that I like to use this giant scoop
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that I love and then this little funnel. We'll grab a jar and get started
16:38
Okay Now we're going for about a quarter inch of headspace here. On this that's the
17:06
first little step so it's a little much still. Just a little higher. Basically you
17:16
want to be almost to the top. Next I'm going to take a nice clean rag get it
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damp. We're going to use that to quickly wipe this rim so it's really good and
17:31
clean. That's gonna help a lot with sealing. You got to do it without knocking
17:37
more jelly onto the top. I'll grab a lid from out of this pot
17:47
and a ring. We'll set it on. Now this is important we're only going to tighten
17:55
this down till it's call it finger tight. So not tight with your whole hand but
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just finger tight. If we do it too much tighter than that then when we go to
18:05
actually, jar still pretty hot, when we go to actually process this in the canner
18:11
your jars can just totally crack and just totally fall apart. I've definitely
18:16
done that before. So don't over tighten at this point just finger tight is good
18:21
enough. Okay we're gonna go and fill up the rest of the jars
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At this stage you can see this is still really quite liquid. As it cools though
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it's gonna totally set up. After you've canned this and processed it before you
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put it in the fridge or anything like that. You don't need to refrigerate this
18:49
by the way but if you were to just want to put one of your jars in the refrigerator for immediate use you should let it sit at room temperature
18:55
for about a day, about 24 hours. You can already see what's on like the spatula that's already cooling. It's
19:13
already got a nice jelly consistency and as it cools that's how it's all gonna be
19:21
It's really good. We're gonna go ahead and process this now but there's one
19:25
more cool thing I want to tell you about and that is that first of all if these
19:30
didn't set up, if they stayed a little more liquidy, I mean this is really
19:35
liquidy, but if once they're all done and they've had a day to sit it's still
19:41
pretty liquidy it's okay. It's actually a delicious syrup as well. This blackberry
19:48
syrup goes really well on pancakes and waffles and anything else you'd put a nice berry syrup on. So it's not the end of the world. If you want to make
19:56
blackberry syrup specifically you could do exactly what we did here today and do
20:01
a double batch when it comes to the fruit and the sugar depending on the
20:05
thickness. If you want it a little bit thicker but not jelly you could do a
20:10
one-and-a-half batch. So instead of nine cups of juice which was the
20:14
double batch I might do six and a half or so, somewhere in there
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Six and a half, six and two-thirds cups of juice and do that with about four and
20:28
a half cups of sugar but only one packet of the sure gel or you can do a full
20:33
double batch of everything with only one packet of the sure gel and that's just going to get you less thickening but it's going to give you the same great
20:38
flavor. You're going to end up with some delicious syrup. But now we're going to
20:43
go ahead and put this in the canner. Okay we're going to go ahead and lower this in. It's not to a full rolling boil
20:53
I actually prefer that at this point because if the water is a lot hotter
20:59
than the jars it can also cause the jars to crack. Now the jars are hot, the jelly
21:04
is good and warm, fairly hot when I put it in so we won't get much of that but
21:09
if the water was super boiling then we could end up with some cracks. You should
21:14
also make sure that the water is covering the jars with at least an inch
21:18
or so of water on top. We've got at least that, one to two inches is preferred. Once
21:23
that's a good gentle boil then I'm going to go ahead and set a timer for five
21:28
minutes. Jellies only need to process for about five minutes and then we'll go
21:31
ahead and take them out. We'll be all done with our jelly. All right time's up
21:38
Still got a nice hard boil going. I'll take this off the burner, set it aside right there
21:46
I'm just gonna pull these out one by one rather than lifting the whole rack out
22:00
I'm going to set them right side up. Okay now we're gonna leave these and over the next few minutes they should
22:15
all of them should pop. A lot of times you'll hear it but essentially as it
22:20
cools it's gonna suck in. We just heard one, this one just popped. So in a few
22:26
minutes once all these have popped and once they're good and dry we'll go ahead and label them then we'll be done. All right after a few minutes all of these
22:32
popped but one, one of them didn't and I noticed pretty quickly why. In fact I
22:38
went ahead and took the ring off and I just overfilled it a little bit. So I
22:42
cleaned the lid off, took just a tiny bit out, put the, cleaned the lid really well
22:47
put it back on and I'm just gonna process it again with some other jam
22:51
that I'm making. So no big deal. So at this point since they've all popped I just tighten down the lids a little tighter. Don't go crazy but I go ahead
22:58
and tighten them down just a little bit more. Some people just take the rings off. I leave the rings on. Anyway the other thing I'm gonna do is label these. Now
23:06
you can just write on them what they are and the date. Those are the two
23:10
things I want on every jar but in a little video which I'll link to right
23:15
here I show you exactly why I don't like to do that anymore. So I like to use
23:19
labels but just to make them look nice I've got a few designs. If you want them
23:24
you can have them. I just have these templates on my website pantrypreparedness.com
23:28
You can go get them for free. So just go to pantrypreparedness.com
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slash labels. You can print these off and then I just handwrite in the month and
23:38
the year and then I put these on just like see I'll find with a pretty little
23:44
front here and put them on just like this. And there we have a nice labeled
23:49
bottle of blackberry jam. Once this sets up it'll be really nice. If it doesn't
23:55
set up well again we've got syrup. I'm actually gonna make some syrup right now. I'm gonna basically use how much juice I get from what I have left but I have a
24:03
feeling it's gonna be about seven cups or so of juice which is obviously more than a single batch. I'm gonna use a proportionate amount of sugar based on
24:11
the same recipe but just one packet of sure gel and that way it just won't set
24:14
up as thick. And if I get a chance I'll show you what that looks like sometime
24:19
here soon. Anyway I hope that this video was helpful for you and I hope to see you further on this channel. If you like preparedness stuff I definitely do a lot
24:26
with food preparation and preservation that kind of stuff but there's a lot more that goes into preparedness and we talk about all of it here at
24:33
Pantry Preparedness. Hope to see you in our future videos
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#Juice
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