sweet violet jelly

sweet violets

Very shortly after my recent post about not picking enough violets to make jelly, we were pleasantly surprised by a friend dropping off a container-full at our door that he'd harvested for us while out harvesting nettle; 2 lightly-packed cups' worth. It was just the right amount to make the jelly!

Hillary packed them all into a quart jar

Because the violets are so tender, we set to using them right away.

fitting in every last one

we filled the jar with boiling water, to cover

topped with a lid, we set them aside to soak

Generally you only need to soak them overnight to get a good amount of color and flavor from them but we soaked about 24 hours which gave us a very deep purple infusion...

violet liquid after 24 hours

Kale enjoyed the next step: measuring off 2 cups of the beautiful liquid (discard any extra) and adding 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, then watching it instantly react and change color...

a chemical reaction

After that, with jelly-making being such a rapid process, things moved too quickly to take photos. We poured the liquid into a pot, added a packet of pectin and brought to a boil. Once boiling, we added 4 cups of sugar and brought it back to boil hard for one minute and removed from heat. I'd like to experiment with honey and Pomona's pectin next time which is what I normally use for all my jams and jellies to avoid the refined sugar.

sweet violet jelly foam

Kale had the next job of skimming the foam off the top with a large spoon. It tasted like sweet violet mousse! Delicious!

skimmed jelly on fresh from the oven yam biscuits

The last job was to pull our sterilized quarter-pint and half-pint jars (this recipe makes approximately 3 half-pint or 6 quarter-pint jars) and their lids and rings out of the boiling water bath where they were sterilizing.

We quickly and very carefully filled them, leaving a half-inch space at the top, topped with lids and rings (the jars were too hot to touch so I did all of this part) and set them aside to self-seal. No further processing necessary!

the sweet results!

While a shorter soaking time usually yields a fainter, more delicate looking purple jelly, our jelly turned out to be a jewel-like ruby red in the jars. On a background of cream cheese on crackers it looks more pinkish-purple.

Kale and I both describe the flavor of the jelly as an "in your head" experience, literally. You don't really taste the violet immediately with your tongue but rather as a subtle and sweet floral scent in the back of your mouth and in your nose as you swallow. It's simply delightful! We'll be making this every spring now, for sure.