July sees the start of our food harvesting and preserving season. Last week we made a delicious elderflower ice cream with our home-made elderflower cordial.
This week, we’ve made some redcurrant jelly using a recipe from Cordon Bleu Preserving.
We inherited half a dozen or so redcurrant bushes when we took on our allotment last year. On our last trip down there this week, the bushes were heaving with little red jewels.
It took the pair of us about two hours to pick about half of them. When we got home, we gave them a rinse – they barely filled our small colander!
Despite this, we kept back a couple of cupfuls (to go into a pie) before making rest into jelly… it actually made 8 jars.
We know that redcurrant jelly is usually matched with lamb or game and a dollop or two can go into a gravy for extra flavour. We’ll have to look for some other good flavour matches…any ideas?

Redcurrant jelly
Ingredients
- Redcurrants
- 800 g granulated or preserving sugar to each litre of juice made
Instructions
- Gently rinse the redcurrants in a colander before carefully removing the stems and putting the fruit into Kilner jars
- Firmly cover the jars with lids before putting them in to an oven at 300ºF/Gas mark 2 until the juice has run well
- Remove from the oven carefully remove the lids and turn out the fruit into a jelly bag or muslin overnight
- Measure the juice and take the correct proportion of sugar
- Add the sugar to a large heavy-bottomed saucepan or jam pan and warm on a low heat
- In a separate pan, heat the juice to boiling point (but don't allow to boil)
- Add the juice carefully to the warm sugar stirring all the time until the sugar has dissolved
- Pour jelly at once into sterilised jars
- Allow to cool before screwing the lids on firmly