quince heaven

Thank you very much for all your kind comments on my last post, I am delighted that you all like my blog to be the way it is! Thank you also for your happy blog birthday wishes. This was actually back in August but I somehow never got around to mentioning it until now.

A very warm welcome to all my new followers! I am glad you have found me here and hope to see you back soon.

On to today's post. I have had a quince tree in my garden for a few years now. The first two years it didn't fruit. Then I had a bumper crop of quinces which I made into jars and jars of soft wobbly jelly. I also gave plenty of quinces away. Unfortunately, there has been no repeat of this year of abundance, we had Spring storms during the crucial blossom time with the surviving few blooms falling off later. The tree is at the top of our back garden where it is very exposed to the howling Scottish winds. The last of the jelly was long gone and I was hoping for at least a few fruit this year. I was thrilled to find 4 quincelets, all of which survived into quince adulthood. Hurrahh. There were small ones and two normal sized ones.

I usually cut the quince up, core and all, and cover the pieces up with a little water, bring this to the boil and leave to simmer until the chunks are really soft, to the point of disintegrating. I then strain the pulp through a muslin without squeezing it and discard the pulp. There wasn't much juice.... but then I read in my Good Food cookery book that it is possible to do the cooking process twice by adding more water to the strained pulp and simmer this once more to extract more quince juices. I did this because I only had what you see on the picture. I always add a red skinned apple to get a pleasing jelly colour.

I measured the strained juice and added 450 g of sugar per 600 ml juice. Quince contain plenty of pectin and in principle, normal sugar is fine. I only had enough normal sugar for half the amount and resorted to using jam sugar that I found at the back of my cupboard. I was too lazy to walk to the corner shop to buy some sugar.... After the sugar was dissolved at a low temperature, I turned the heat up and rapidly boiled the syrup for approximately 10 minutes. Somehow with quince jelly, I never get a set when testing but experience has taught me than it takes about 20 minutes for a good jelly when using normal sugar. I reduced the time randomly by half because I used jam sugar.

I got several jars of delicately wobbly jelly! Yesterday my mum made fresh scones for tea and I tried it. It tastes divine and the quince flavour is strong despite the double extraction of the quince pulp.