Showing posts with label apples. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apples. Show all posts

Apple Mint Jelly, No Pectin Needed

What is it with the wildly varying proportions in recipes for making mint jelly?!

I made apple mint jelly once before, using a recipe from a Reddit thread because I had a lot of gleaned apples that year and could make the recipe that involved cooking the apples down, extracting juice, and adding vinegar. Yes, this is extra work, but a number of mint jelly recipes call for this approach. Apple juice as medium, essentially.

Right now it isn't apple season but boy, do I have mint (as one does), so I decided to make it using some bottled apple cider I have on hand.

Various recipes call for cooking the mint leaves in water or juice, then going forward with the recipe. I don't want to use pectin so I'm going to lean on apple juice plus some added lemon juice. I remember doing this with the previous batch and getting a good jell.

The proportions thing, though.... After cutting all the mint in the yard, stripping leaves, and setting the small leaves aside to dry for mint tea, I have 2 cups. Do I start with a recipe based on one cup and scale everything up accordingly? If I do that, which one-cup recipe do I start with—the one that has a 1:1 ratio of mint to liquid or the one that has 1:4?? (That one just sounds weak-ass, if you'll pardon the term.) The National Center for Home Food Preservation does a lot of testing, particularly for whether the ratios are food safe, so I'm inclined to stick with them and ignore their use of pectin. Below my recipe I list the sources I consulted with their varying ratios, what liquid they used, and whether pectin was involved.

Ingredients

2 cups packed mint leaves, roughly chopped
3 cups apple cider (I used commercial cider because I had it on hand and it's time to use it up; this could be apple juice instead)
2 cups sugar
2 T. lemon juice
~1 T. dried mint leaves, optional

So my starting ratio is 2:3:2, plus 2 T. lemon juice.

Instructions

Read the National Center for Home Food Preservation on canning basics if this is your first time on the merry-go-round.

Sterilize your canning jars and get everything ready. 

  • I put my jars on a big roasting pan in the oven at 200 degrees for at least 10 minutes. Timing this right gives you warm jars when you're ready to put hot product into them, which is important; hot jelly going into a cold jar can crack it.
  • Put a small plate in the freezer to use for your jelling test.
  • Get that big pot of water warming. If you're using a full-sized canning kettle it will take a while. I sometimes use my soup pot for a smaller batch, placing a metal trivet in the bottom to keep the jars from touching the heat directly. I may also speed things up by using my hot-water kettle for a faster heating of a smaller quantity and pouring that in, maybe doing this a couple of times.

Extract mint-flavored juice. Bring the chopped mint and apple juice or cider to a boil in a large pan such as a Dutch oven. You can muddle the leaves a bit with a potato masher if you like. Once the juice has come to a boil, cover and set off the heat to steep for 10 minutes or so. Strain the leaves out and toss them in the compost.

Make the jelly. Place the minty juice in a Dutch oven or other large, heavy pan. Stir in the sugar and lemon juice. On high heat, bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Cook until the liquid runs together when you lift the spoon, or test on that plate you put in the freezer to see if the liquid will wrinkle when you run the tip of a spoon through it. This will take a while because we're not using pectin in this recipe. I used a thermometer, but I find that even when I don't hit the recommended 220 degrees if I've gotten over 205 my products will set up.

Optional mint intensification. Taste the liquid early on (carefully! It's very hot!). If you'd like the flavor to be a bit more minty (mintier?), place the dried mint leaves in a teaball and put that in the liquid to steep while it's coming to the jelling stage. I did that for this batch and my official taste tester said it's the perfect mintiness, meaning it's very minty.

Canning step. Pour the hot jelly into hot, sterile jars, leaving ¼ inch headspace. Wipe the rims with a dampened clean paper towel; put the lids on. Process 10 minutes in boiling water, timing it from when the water returns to the boil after putting the jars in.

Yield: 5 quarter-pints that jelled beautifully with zero pectin. Picture below only shows four because one has already been used up by Chief Taste Taster, aka my Sweet Hubs.

What I don't do that you may find in other recipes. 

  • I don't add a drop or two of green food coloring because I like the natural golden color. That commercial mint jelly looks like Jell-O to me. If the bright green is important to you, by all means go for it.
  • I don't save some fresh mint leaves to chop fine and stir in at the end as the jelly goes into the jars. Some people like little things floating in their jelly. I don't.
  • I also skip skimming the foam in some recipes. I stir it down and mix it in. If it really looked foamy all across the top of the pan I might skim it. When I do, I put the foam in a little jar to go in the fridge because it's perfectly good! In peak canning season I might end up with a jar of mixed flavors from three or four different recipes and it can be delicious, a sort of bumbleberry jam by proxy.

Photo of 4 glass quarter-pint jars holding a golden jelly, label that reads Apple Mint Jelly From the Kitchen of Barb Chamberlain 2026

Mint Jelly Recipes

List below has the recipes I consulted and the proportions, along with whether or not they add any lemon juice or vinegar (another element that varies widely) and whether they use pectin.

Ratios listed are in cups for mint:water:sugar, with a note if the recipe calls for apple juice instead of water. I'm listing them in order by the volume of mint leaves and liquid. If the recipe calls for apple juice then it shouldn't need as much sugar for sweetness, although it needs it for jelling action.

Related Reading and Recipes



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Canstravaganza 2025

Food in Jars blogger Marisa was holding a canning challenge that started in January. I happened across it after I'd already inadvertently completed the February assignments: frozen fruit and freezer excavation. I love that she includes a community-building item in each month. She also notes that this is all in fun and we should feel free to mix things up. I can say that I did at least one of the two challenges for each month at some point during the year, just not necessarily in the month she listed them.

January
  • Food in Jars challenge: Root vegetables and brassicas. I didn't check this box. I've made banh mi mix in the past (shredded daikon and carrot in vinegar) and it lasts forever in the fridge so I'll come back to this at some point. Community-building assignment: Share a jar. Definitely did that; I took jars to meetings and gave them to friends. That happens just about every month, actually.
February
  • Tayberry Jam Recipe by Chef Heidi Fink. 11 quarter-pints, 6 half-pints
  • Classic Raspberry Jam Recipe by Creative Canning. 7 quarter-pints, 7 half-pints
  • Blackberry Roasted Plum Preserves by Southern Fatty. 8 quarter-pints, 8 half-pints
  • Blackberry Plum Fruit Leather: No recipe needed. Pureed blackberries and plums in the food processor, dropped in dollops about the size of a Nilla wafer on the dehydrator trays, and dried overnight to produce little fruity coins by the next morning. Those went into the freezer.
  • The Food in Jars challenge was using frozen fruit, the community challenge was freezer excavation. For me, that came up when the freezer defrosted later this year. But I did make all of this month's jams from berries and fruits I'd harvested last year and stored in the freezer.
March
Working with green tomatoes frozen in 2024, 12 pounds of tomatillos frozen in 2023, I made:
  • Tomatillo Lime Jalapeño Jam: 8 half-pints, 12 quarter-pints. I added 3 jalapeños to the recipe, wanting it to have a bit of heat because that felt like a fit.
  • Green Tomato/Tomatillo Chutney: 12 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints. I linked to the recipe although I think in future I'll use my own Green Tomato Chutney recipe whether I'm using green tomatoes on their own or mixed with tomatillos. I can attest that the spicing mix in that is really, really good.
  • Food in Jars challenge: Make a mix. I didn't make a mix in the sense of a muffin mix or salad, but I did mix green tomatoes and tomatillos. Community challenge, contribute to a community fridge or pantry. I think we did drop something off at the food shelves by the community garden on Yew, and I gave away some herbs when I had more than I could use later in the year.
April
  • No canning, but the Food in Jars community challenge was to plant something and I did that. The canning challenge was herbs and alliums. I collect and dry herbs when the pots cry out for harvesting, so that happens when it happens.
May
  • No canning. Food in Jars challenge was berries. Mine are still growing at this point. The community challenge was to learn from a friend. I swap canning recipes with my friend Stefanie' we have different pickled cherry recipes and I like mine.

June

  • Sweet & Salty Pickled Cherries,: 26 half-pints (I'm not messing around this year. It took a great deal of discipline to stretch last year's cherries to this spring!)
  • Food in Jars challenge: Jam. I cover that in other months. The community challenge was to attend a potluck. Our neighborhood potluck is in August and I went to that.

July

  • Tayberry Rhubarb Jam: 9 quarter-pints, 8 half-pints
  • Food in Jars challenge: Pickles, and I made those pickled cherries in June. Community challenge, support a local farmer or grower. I do that with regular trips to the Olympia Farmers' Market, and I buy eggs from the "farmette" stand down the street.
August
  • Apple Cardamom Rosemary Jam: 4 quarter-pints, 4 half-pints. Read my notes on seasoning adjustments in my piece on making lots of use of apples
  • Froze 8 pounds of sliced apples for future apple-pear butter; the apples are ready ahead of pears this year
  • Food in Jars challenge: Sauces, which I'd thought I would make this year. I ended up doing this in November when I experimented with ketchup (never again!) and ended up making a chutney sauce. The community challenge was to gather or glean, and this time of year I'm picking blackberries. I also get apples as they ripen from a couple of publicly located trees.
September
  • Last September was a canning frenzy. This September wasn't. I went on a two-week vacation starting Sept. 27 and needed to get things done to be ready for that.
  • Food in Jars challenge: Condiments, and host a swap. I did the ketchup effort in November. A canning swap sounds like a fun idea; maybe I'll organize that one of these years.
October
  • Also not a canning month, but the "October Surprise" of a defrosted freezer guaranteed I'd be canning in November.
  • Food in Jars challenge: Drying and dehydration. I did that back in February with fruit leather, and over the course of the summer I harvested and dried some of the herbs I grow. Community challenge, share your knowledge. I write blog posts to capture and share my recipe explorations so check, did that.

November
  • Blackberry Jelly: 15 quarter-pints, 6 half-pints.
  • Tayberry Jam: The tried and true Chef Heidi Fink recipe I used last year. 
  • Sour Cherry Amaretto Jam: I used the no-pectin sour cherry jam recipe from Sourdough Brandon, enhanced by the amaretto suggestion in the recipe from DishNTheKitchen.
  • "Razzbuzzy Jam": 7 quarter-pints. Followed the Classic Raspberry Jam and stirred in 3 T. of raspberry liqueur. Not very buzzy, but tasty!
  • Spiced Blueberry Jam: 7 quarter-pints.
  • Smoky Spicy Tomato Jam: 3  half-pints, 11 quarter-pints. This Food in Jars is on repeat from last year and it's my go-to.
  • Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce: 8 half-pints, 11 quarter-pints.
  • Salted Caramel Pear Butter: 2 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints
  • Cranberry Orange Jam with Crystallized Ginger: 3 half-pints, 13 quarter-pints
    • Read my comments on the Serious Eats site. Allow for more cook time to get softened citrus and cranberries. Try reducing the sugar a bit. You don't need pectin.
    • This is also the point in the year when I start thinking I should have put up more half-pints, ordered more quarter-pint jars, or both! I like the quarter-pint size for gifts.
  • Spiced Apple Butter: 4 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints, 1 6-oz jar, an experiment in reusing a commercial jar and lid that went into the refrigerator because I wasn't confident about the seal.
  • Food in Jars challenge: Apples. Yep, got that covered. Community challenge, barter with a friend or neighbor. I do a lot in our Buy Nothing group, both giving and receiving. That space doesn't permit bartering but it feels as if it's in the general spirit.
December
  • Food in Jars challenge: Use it up! Is she kidding? I make far too much to use it up in a year! Community challenge, bake for others. Yep, did that.
Not the blowout year that 2024 was, but then I still have jars of product from that year on the shelves. Anyone want some jam? Chutney? Green tomato sauce? Anyone? And I did actually end up hitting the mark on the Food in Jars challenge, just in different months.
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Spiced Apple Butter Recipe

Admittedly not the biggest tweaks I've ever made to a recipe, but here it is. In this year's food preservation I found myself going back to last year's canning posts for recipes and links and I'll keep this running tally going.

I had rounded up quite a few apple butter recipes when I invented my Chai Apple Butter Reciped last year. I wanted one that used apple cider vinegar for the extra tang; some recipes don't include that, or don't use much. For this batch I started with The Pioneer Woman's apple butter recipe. 

Since I was simultaneously working on two other recipes I used the slow-cooker method that Food in Jars uses for her Salted Caramel Pear Butter (made a batch of that two days ago). My slow cooker has a steam vent hole in the lid. For the first stage of cooking in this recipe I block that with a chopstick to keep the moisture in and cook the flavor into the flesh of the apples. That comes out for the later stage when I need the liquid to cook off.

The Pioneer Woman calls for adding a cup of water. I substituted apple cider. Why not make it even more appley when you have the chance?

Earlier this year I processed a lot of gleaned apples with my corer/slicer and had both skin-on and peeled in the freezer. For this recipe I used the ones with the skins, for the extra pectin and flavor. This saves the peeled ones for a future apple pie or other dessert use. Go with what you have and what you prefer. You can run the cooked mash through a food mill if you started with unpeeled apples and don't want the extra fiber.

Of course, per the title here, I oomphed up the spice. She called for 1 teaspoon of apple pie spice or pumpkin pie spice for three pounds of apples. I drew some inspiration from British Mixed Spice, discovered along the way in my never-again-will-I-make-ketchup research. I wanted it to be cinnamon-forward. This might sound like a lot of seasonings but it didn't taste overly spiced with that dusty quality I've created at times with over-enthusiastic perusal of the spice drawer.

I needed to deal with the aftermath of the Great Freezer Defrost of 2025, so my quantities are larger than my starting-point recipe: 4 pounds of apples. More than this quantity of pears had worked just fine in the slow cooker. You can scale this back to the quantities in The Pioneer Woman's recipe.

Ingredients

4 lbs. apples, chopped. These can be frozen or canned, skins on or off according to your preference
1 c. apple cider vinegar
1-1/2 c. apple cider or apple juice
3/4 t. salt
1-2/3 c. brown sugar
2 t. vanilla paste or vanilla extract, if you have it on hand
2 t. flaky sea salt or kosher salt
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. black pepper
1/4 t. nutmeg
1/4 t. mace (optional; for me this is the essence of pumpkin pie spice)
1/4 t. cardamom
1/8 t. cloves

Directions

Place apples, vinegar, cider/juice and salt in slow cooker and stir to combine. Turn it to high. Cook for 60-90 minutes, stirring occasionally. You want the fruit to be soft enough to be blendable.

Blend with an immersion stick blender if you have one. Or remove a couple of cups at a time, blend in a blender or food processor, then return all the blended sauce to the slow cooker. Be careful when blending hot semi-liquid foods. Don't fill the container at or above the halfway mark, keep a towel over the top, adjust the lid so you're letting steam escape rather than build up. All of this is why I prefer my immersion blender.

Mix the dried spices together, then add the brown sugar, vanilla and spices to the pot. Prop the lid slightly ajar so steam can escape, maybe with your spatula or a chopstick laid crosswise so the lid can rest on it on one end. 

Cook on high, stirring often, until it's the color and consistency you want. If you want to be thick and spreadable this will take a while, 2-3 hours. If you stop much sooner, congratulations! You have made a spiced applesauce. 

Stirring often means every 15 minutes or so. Food in Jars says to stir every 30 minutes but if I waited that long I'd have apple butter stuck on the bottom of the pot. You can let it go a bit longer early on when the pot has plenty of liquid in it. The more it cooks down and thickens, the more you need to be sure to scrape the bottom thoroughly. 

How hot your slow cooker gets will be a factor only you can judge, and that will affect your stirring frequency and total cook time. Food in Jars blogger Marisa notes that the older Crock-Pot had a gentler low temperature than newer ones. That's my experience with my newer model; I really can't go off and leave it.

Prep your jars for canning according to the safe canning practices from the National Center on Home Food Preservation. Process 15 minutes at full boil.

My yield: 4 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints, 1 6-oz. jar in a reuse experiment from a commercial product (nice straight-sidded jar)

Canning posts usually show something like this as the triumphant closing shot, or maybe a close-up of the delectable contents. 

In reality the closing scene is more like this. 

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My Circular Economy of Apples

Every apple recipe I made last year—and that's a long list—started out with fresh apples to which I applied some labor. Peel, yes or no depending on the recipe. Core, yes or no depending on the recipe. Slice, dice, or shred. Cook with spices. Discard something.

Bear in mind that my parents grew up during the Depression and raised me to be thrifty. I minimize my food waste as much as possible. What there is of it goes into the garden beds in the central composting square. I use the keyhole gardening technique, AKA dump food scraps into a space in the middle of the raised bed, let Mother Nature and Father Time do their thing. (My raised beds are rectangular, built by my Sweet Hubs from a kit, rather than the round shape most often illustrated. Compost happens either way.)

But why compost before you've gotten every last possible bit of use? Although there's such a thing as taking it a bit too far. I present my lessons learned for your entertainment and possible benefit.

A typical two-day cycle starts with the apples I glean from various roadside trees and pick up when a neighbor leaves a bag by the curb. (So really, it's a three-day cycle. Day one, collect apples.)


First, I use my handy-dandy apple corer without peeling and prep 8 lbs. of sliced apples to freeze for later use in apple-pear butter, or possibly this Apple Caramel Sauce from Food in Jars, which sounds scrumptious (recipe can be made using other fruits too!).

Put all the cores in a bag. Plenty of apple-ness left there that can be rendered into juice.

Use the apple corer with the peeler setting to slice another 4 pounds of apples, then dice those up to macerate overnight with sugar for Apple Cardamom Rosewater Jam. Throw the peels in the bag with the core; they carry pectin that will help the juice jell.


Simmer those cores and peels until soft with some ginger in preparation for Apple Ginger Jelly. I made this one last year and it's going on annual repeat. Set that up to drain overnight.

The next morning, discover that the apple juice is maybe a trifle bland. I really should have gotten fresh gingerroot, not just used the ginger paste from a tube that I had in the fridge. Okay, I can fix this, I still have pounds and pounds of apples. Quarter a bunch of the smaller ones and throw into the strained juice so it will reduce and pick up more appley goodness. Add more ginger paste. (Really should have biked to the store.) 

Update on Apple Ginger Jelly: Sweet Hubs ended up running to the store and getting gingerroot. Sliced that up (the recipe calls for 3 oz. to go with 2 lbs. apples, and I had 3 lbs.) and simmered it in with the apples. Makes all the difference!

In the meantime, use my food mill to smoosh the cores and peels and squeeze out every bit of apple pulp I can. I figured I'd throw that into the future apple-pear butter, but hey, that looks a lot like applesauce! Granted, these apples have already given up some (most) of their flavor. Here comes the Maple Applesauce recipe from Food in Jars to the rescue, with its cinnamon sticks and maple for some extra flavor oomph.

But wait, those apples I added to the juice are also going to be nice and soft. Slow my roll on the applesauce plan until I can get those smooshed up too. Ideally they would drain for 6-8 hours per the recipe, but y'know, it's okay if some of the juice goes into the applesauce.

After tasting the apple mush, though, I decide it really has lost almost all its flavor. Even the addition of the apples that had more flesh and a tablespoon of lemon juice didn't really fix it.

At that point I have a few options: Blend up some blackberries with the bland applesauce and make fruit leather. Freeze this stuff in a muffin tin, which makes handy half-cup quantities, and save it to bake into future muffins and breads, recognizing they'll need more spice. Bake a batch of muffins or bread right now, for that matter. Or head into a fresh batch of applesauce with whole apples that I can mix this into and resist the urge to restart this whole circular economy again.

I do have an entire bike pannier full of apples still to process.... 

Clearly Indian Apple Chutney lies ahead. I made that last year and it tasted fantastic with some Cougar Gold aged white cheddar on a cracker. But not today. Chutney takes a while to cook and I have apple mush to deal with. That muffin tin of apple mush for the freezer sounds like the easiest way to go. I just have to label it with honesty: "Bland Applesauce 2025".

Recipes in this post

  • Apple Caramel Sauce
  • Apple Cardamom Rosewater Jam: Flavor notes to read before you make this! 
    • She says to cook 40 minutes minimum, longer for deeper color. I probably cooked twice as long to get it to a consistency that looked like jam and yet still had some apple bits. Cook for the texture you want in your jam.
    • She calls for 5 cardamom pods. I used 8 pods and it was so subtle I couldn't taste it, but my pods were a bit old. Ended up adding something like 3/4 t. ground cardamom. Definitely a taste and adjust seasoning.
    • She calls for 1 T. rosewater or "a splash". I appreciate subtle rosewater, but too much and it will taste like hand lotion for me. I started with 1/2 t., stirred in, let it cook a minute, tasted. Did this until I was at 1-1/2 t. rosewater, so half what she called for. Most definitely a taste and adjust seasoning.
  • Apple Ginger Jelly: I didn't have fresh ginger root on hand (gasp!) so I used the ginger paste in a tube I find so, so handy. That really didn't cut it and I had to do make some amendments (add more apples and cook down more juice with gingerroot). Get fresh gingerroot.
  • Maple Applesauce
  • Indian Apple Chutney
Related reading

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