The Cottage Smallholder

Whilst waiting for my 2lbs rose hips to finish steaming this morning I thought I would have a quick check on recipes on internet for rose hip jelly. I'm slightly OCD so always double check recipes and ingredients  - this often leads to doubts and questions - I'm a fool to myself really.

Anyhoo.........I discovered recipes for rose hip jelly that use:

1) rose hips, sugar, lemon juice and pectin

or

2)rose hips, sweet apples, lemon zest/juice, sugar (cottage smallholder is one)

or

3) rose hips, crab apples or cookers, lemons, sugar

Some use 3 x apples to rose hips and some 2 x apples to hips.

Now I thought you had to use apples with high pectin content to help get the jelly to set and that sweet apples were low in pectin, so that confused me.

Also which sugar do you prefer when making jellies? is there any difference between cane sugar and sugar from beet. Pam Corbin of River Cottage fame suggests that a refined white sugar is best for delicate fruits and berries, jellies, curds and flavoured liquers. She notes that Sugar from Beet in Britain (Silver Spoon) is intensively refined. And that Golden granulated is better for marmalades, and strong flavour fruit as it keeps its golden colour and delicate flavour.

So now then - my rosehips have steamed and produced 600ml of concentrated juice. I am now going to boil the pulp left in the steamer with a little bit of water and strain this through a jelly bag to extract as much juice left as possible. I'm hoping for at least another 300 ml then tonight I will steam the apples to get juice from them and add to rose hip juice and make my jelly tomorrow 

What ingedients do you find produces the best results for your rose hip jelly?