Making Mint Jelly: Part One

This is the first time that we are trying this, and we haven't even finished yet, so don't try to follow this recipe until I posted a final part that says it actually worked.

We have tons of mint in our garden. One day DH asked curiously, "Can we make mint jelly?"

I said I didn't know, but we started hitting the recipe books. We found one recipe in Chile that called for cooking a large quantity of green apples then adding mint flavoring. That wasn't quite what we wanted, so I set to work online. The recipes that I found fit into two classes, using apples as a base and using purchased pectin. After discussion with his mother and some look in the stores, we decided to try the second method.

So I started the first phase today. I collected lots and lots of mint. No, I didn't measure it. It was probably five or six large handfuls of very tall mint stocks. I used one of those slightly curved, two-handled knives to chop the mint. I put that in a pot with about 2 L of water.

I let it simmer for couple hours. When DH got home from work, we brought up to a boil, then turn it off. Then he put it down in the workshop to cool.

The packets of pectin called for 1 L of cold juice each. To that they add a kilo of sugar. So I need to strain my liquid and get it cool.

Figuring out the best way to strain it took some experimentation. I decided to use wine bottles with screw on lids for storing the juice until we feel like making the jelly (hopefully this weekend). What I did was use a large spoon with holes in it to remove the majority of the mint pieces. I lost some liquid that way, but mint is cheap and water is not that expensive. I put a coffee filter into a funnel in the top of the wine bottle. Then I ladled in the liquid, trying not to get too much leaves with. When I got to the bottom, I just scraped all of it into the filter.

The result of this effort is probably close to 2 L of mint-flavored water. It took me three filters, but the first one was part of my experimentation process. DH took the bucket of mint pieces that I took out the other spoon outside to the compost.

Now, we let it cool and see what happens.