The usual advice is to stick the boiled up fruit in a bag and leave to drip. Don’t squeeze the bag, or it will be cloudy. Well, my investigations have found that it’s not really the lack of bag squeezing the helps to get clear jelly. It’s the leaving it overnight. You then take the liquor off any sediment that’s fallen to the bottom of the bucket.
I just did my annual crab apple jelly. 8lbs of crab apples. For one batch I let it drip into a bucket, didn’t squeeze and made the jam immediately. The result was pretty cloudy. For the other, I squeezed that first bag and strained through a bit more, which also got a really good squeeze. I then left it in the fridge for a day, because I was tired of making jelly. The bits all settled to the bottom, and the result is perfectly clear. So – you can squeeze the bag, so long as you leave it to settle.
Oh, and crab apple and haw jelly isn’t great. The haws smell like sardines whilst cooking, and make a very sharp jelly. Maybe I stuck too many in. Still, it’s not ruined, just not really worth the bother when the straight stuff tastes so good.
There, a dumb entry to get this thing going again. I’ve been busy, and not programmed much.
