Blackberry Jelly

So I've been on a roll with this Suzie Homemaker stuff as my dad calls it. Tonight Diane and I picked some more blackberries and I had just enough to make some blackberry jelly. If I didn't do the first part of it myself I would have taken pictures just so I have a reference in the future. Making the jelly was pretty simple, although I wouldn't recommend starting it at 8:20pm like I did. :-P

To get the juice you need 10ish cups of blackberries. After removing all of the bad berries, stems etc you mush the berries up. After they are good and mushed you strain them through cheesecloth to get the juice and rid them of seeds. Next time I'm doing this with my jam as it is way too seedy. Live and learn, right? So from that you need 3 cups of juice. Next you combine the juice, 5 cups sugar and 1/4 cup lemon juice in a large pan. Bring mixture to a rolling boil and add pectin, I used liquid pectin. Resume a rolling boil and stir constantly for exactly 1 minute. The next thing you know you have jelly! Well, what is going to be jelly. The mix gives you approx 3 pint jars (of course you have properly cleaned them beforehand and you have your canner heated and ready to go). Put the filled jars in the canner for 5 minutes then finally pull out and let sit at room temp for 24hrs. Presto, blackberry jelly!

The foamy stuff that I took of the top was pretty tasty so I look forward to giving it a try. Big shout out to my dad for helping me with the canning process, my grandmother for answering a million questions, Diane for letting me pick the berries and most of all my mother for providing the entertainment. She was doing Zumba the whole time. Haha. The pictures I do have won't upload, grr. Mom wants me to try peach on the next go around so we will see how that goes. Yippie! Oh, and my raspberry jam is quite good. It's just a bit seedy so next time I will use cheesecloth on that too.

Jam

So the other evening Diane and I picked raspberries. They are soooo yummy! I have been debating on what to do with them so I decided to try my hand at making jam. I have made blackberry jelly with my grandmother before but it has been so long that I forgot exactly how to do everything. So, as this was my first attempt alone I decided to just make 2 pints of jam.

Oh! You want to know the difference between jelly and jam? Well so did I many years ago. Here's what my grandmother taught me:
Jelly: is made with the juice of the fruit
Jam: includes crushed fruit or pulp of the fruit. Jam is usually less firm than jelly.
There ya go. Mystery solved! (You know I had to teach you something today)

So anyway, I made jam. It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. The way I made it was equal cups of sugar to fruit. My understanding of raspberries is that they contain their own pectin so I did not add any extra store bought stuff. Perhaps I'm wrong or you have a better recipe. If you do please share! I would love to cut down the sugar a bit.

The major problem that I ran into is that we don't have a caner. Instead I used a large stock pot. So to sterilize the jars I laid them sideways, covered them with water then boiled them for 10 minutes. During that time I made the jam. 4 cups of raspberries to 4 cups of sugar. In a pot I mushed them together using a potato masher. Once everything was well mashed I brought the mixture to a boil, stirred and allowed it to reach 104'C as the recipe I was using called for. After this I transferred the jam to the sterilized jar, put a lid and rim on and barely tightened them. Finally I moved the jars back to the stock pot (I placed a steamer net in the bottom to keep the jars from touching the bottom of the pot) and boiled for 10 minutes. I did have to lay the jars sideways in order to have water cover the top. I'm sure this is a big no-no for many reasons. Anyway, after the 10 minutes was up I pulled them out and now they are cooling on the counter.

So far the only thing I notice that is wrong is the head space, I was way off. My understanding is that it should be a quarter of an inch or so. Correct? Both jars will be pretty much eaten right away so I'm not overly worried this time. So, how terrible did I mess up? I should probably invest in a caner or a bigger stock pot since I plan to make more because we are going to be picking more soon. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!