Apple Hot Pepper Jelly Recipe

My Hot Pepper Jelly made with a mix of 50% sweet bell peppers, 50% a mix of various mild to hot peppers from the freezer, was a hit in our household. Acquiring a big batch of gleaned apples made me think about creating a variation with an apple base. Could be jam, could be jelly. Getting the gift of peppers from friend Mitzi, a regular Buy Nothing connection, made this an even better idea.

Source recipes

Apple Hot Pepper Jelly, The View from Great Island: Fastest and easiest since it calls for starting with apple juice or apple cider and using red pepper flakes for the heat. Note of caution: Commercial apple juice doesn't have as much pectin as what you make at home, per the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This recipe calls for pectin to make up for that. Parking this for someone who might want a shortcut recipe; I didn't use anything from this.

Apple Jalapeño Jelly, Hola Jalapeño: A recipe developer after my own heart: She made this because she picked a bunch of apples. Her pepper combo sounds pretty hot so I might tame it a bit. Bonus: Cheddar Pie Crust Cracker recipe here too. What a tasty-sounding combo! She goes straight from making juice to straining through a sieve and using it. I know from experience this doesn't produce as much juice as leaving the mash to drain overnight in a jelly bag.

Jalapeño Apple Pepper Jelly, Stemilt: Includes optional addition of cranberries for color and flavor. Someone in the Food in Jars Facebook group suggested cranberry jalapeño jelly a while back so this one is intriguing to make again when I have cranberries on hand. It calls for 3 cups of white vinegar, though, and that sounds too sharp for my taste. It does include a handy ratio I've come across before for jelly: 7/8 c. sugar for each 1 c. juice. This one includes the option of an overnight drip for the juice.

I ended up mostly following the Stemilt recipe despite my misgivings about the vinegar. Hola Jalapeño leaving out the overnight drip won't cut it.

"Feeder" ingredients you could live without:

• I had some leftover commercial apple cider to use up from a container I'd used to provide liquid for the Salted Caramel Apple Butter and some earlier recipes. I used this in place of the water Stemilt's recipe called for. Hola Jalapeño had noted that commercial apple juice doesn't have the pectin of homemade. 
• I had a big bunch of peels and cores left over from prepping apples for the Indian Apple Chutne I'd made earlier. I saved them specifically for their pectin contribution and figured that would take care of the potentially lower pectin level in the commercial cider, along with the other apples I quartered and threw in.

Stemilt called for 6 jalapeño, stems and ribs removed to tame 3 of them, 3 of them with stems/ribs left in to hot it up. I went with 5, figuring I'd taste the resulting juice and adjust. This and my 4 pounds of apples, peels and cores with 3 cups of cider, 3-1/2 cups of white vinegar, yielded 3 cups of juice. They suggested adding water to bring it up to 4 cups. I opted to leave the rich flavor I had produced rather than water it down.

The juice seemed just right for heat, but the cooking stage tamed it a bit. Next time I'd go with 6 jalapeños, thinking of it as 2 per cup of juice, and maybe chop one more to provide tiny bits floating in the jelly. I didn't make any chopped pepper bits this time around, opting for the clear (and therefore sneaky) jelly. My Mad Hatter peppers are sweet with only a tiny bit of heat and they're ripe now. They'd add a nice touch of red without the kick of a Fresno or cayenne. Next time!

Yield: 8 quarter-pints