It took me a while to discover that I could actually eat crabapples, so when it came about writing this crab apple jelly recipe, i felt like a proper blogger and even more importantly, a proper forager!

Crabapples are not available at commercial food markets or food stores (or at least not where I live) so they arent something I have eaten growing up or even really seen that much. There for you have no choice but to go out and find them.

When I first saw crabapples I thought they were one of those ornamental fruits which look really tasty and colourful and good enough to eat but, fo some reason or another, you are recomended not to. Granted I wouldnt eat them straight off the tree, I did try one and they are so tart and almost all pip and skin, there is really no point.

I was very impressed with this recipe but it will result in a cloudy jelly making it this way. It was delicious but it was cloudy! When I did reseach into making crabapple jelly, alot of people used muslin lined this and that or a jelly bag and hung it over night. This, ofcourse would most likely result in a nice clear jelly, and if thats what you want specifically, feel free to find a other recipe or instead of pushing thorugh the fine sieve used a jelly bag. Ill try that next year. Do make sure you leave the lid on whilst stewing the fruit down tho as you dont want to loose too much water.

Do you need to add pectin?

There is enough pectin in the crabapples naturally to set the jelly so no additional pectin is needed in this crabapple jelly recipe.

I served this crabapple jelly mainly on strong cheese because Im a massive cheese fan but you could quite easily serve this with good pork or on good bread or toast.

To make your crabapple jelly…

• Collect your crab apples! You want around 1kg for this recipe…
• Wash and pick through your crab apples…
• Put them in a large pan with the same weight of water (1L) and stew for around 35mins until nice and pulpy…
• Put the mixture through a fine mesh strainer – you can leave over night if needs be…
• Weigh the juice you have and add 3/4 of that weight of sugar…
• Over a low heat disolve the sugar, once disolved, turn the heat to medium and cook until you reach a jammy consistency. You want a temperature of 105 degrees but if you chill a plate and check the setting consistency on that you will be fine. Mine took 32 minutes to reach this…

Check out my raspberry jam recipe…