How to Make Jelly in a Juicer
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Last month, I decided to add my juicer to the pile of stuff headed out in our next yard sale. I hadn’t used it in ages. Then, I started working on my crabapple jelly recipe, and I came across an old forum thread deep in the recesses of the Interwebs where someone mentioned using their juicer to make jelly. Could you do that? Suddenly my juicer seemed interesting again.
So, my husband unearthed my juicer from the yard sale pile, and I got busy experimenting. Turns out you can make jelly in a juicer, and it can be a huge time-saver. Let me show you how I did it, and what I learned.
As I mentioned, I was working on a crabapple jelly recipe at the time. That normally involves quartering a billion crabapples (time consuming), and then heating them on the stove with a bit of water to extract their juice. I wanted to see if I could accomplish the same thing by feeding the crabapples into my juicer whole.
And I was really excited to see that I actually got more juice out of the crabapples this way – with no knife work required. If you look closely at the juice that I extracted, you’ll see a thick layer of foam at the top …
I skimmed it off, just like I would when extracting juice on the stove. Then, I proceeded with my crabapple jelly recipe as usual. If you care about having perfectly clear jelly, you’ll probably want to run it through a jelly strainer first, just to remove any remaining fruit bits. It wasn’t important to me, so I skipped that step, and finished up my batch of jelly.
And I have to tell you: I feel like I got away with something. I can’t believe I made crabapple jelly without ever picking up a knife.
Alright, so now that you know how to make jelly with a juicer, let’s go over some of the pros and cons that I encountered along the way.
Pros
- Minimal prep work – If you’re working with something small, like crabapples, you don’t even have to chop them up first (provided they don’t have big pits/seeds)
- Straining your juice is optional – The juicer removes the skins and seeds for you, so you don’t have to worry about removing those from your finished juice. If you want perfectly clear jelly, you can quickly run the juice through a jelly strainer
- Good at extracting juice from hard fruits – You can use a juicer to juice any type of fruit, but it seems to do an especially good job on apples, pears and the like
Cons
- The juicer won’t extract as much pectin – Pectin is a natural substance found in fruit that helps jelly to gel. When you use heat to extract juice, it draws pectin out of the fruit skins. Since a juicer separates the skins out, you won’t benefit from this source of pectin. That’s not a big deal with most fruits, since they already require you to add pectin for proper gel. But, if you’re making apple or crabapple jelly recipe (that doesn’t call for pectin), you may find you need to add some
- You won’t be able to make fruit butter with the pulp – When you extract your juice on the stove, you can use the leftover pulp to make fruit butter. Getting two products out of one batch of fruit is a great deal. While you can compost your juicer pulp, you won’t be able to make anything else with it
That’s amazing! And you’re saving a ton of energy by not using the stove.
Would love to know if this technique can be used with blackberries or raspberries to remove the seeds for a berry jelly instead of a jam. Love blackberries… hate seeds.
Yep, it would work brilliantly for that, and it would be a lot faster than running the berries through a food mill. If you want perfectly clear jelly, I’d still strain it through a jelly bag or doubled up piece of cheesecloth when you’re done. It’ll remove all those teeny hair-like fibers that blackberries have.
So great!!
I do this with Oregon Grapes to make jelly. Works great!
wow that’s a great technique !
can i use the same technique for watermelon ??
Yep, it should work just fine for watermelon, too 🙂
If you chucked all the ground up mush you have left after juicing into a pan and add a little water, you can boil it up and then strain it and add to your jelly for pectin if it is needed…
Perfect! That was going to be my next question.
Bummer!!! I just threw the pulp in the woods after juicing my crab apples. after I dumped it out I thought …so I wonder if I could have boiled that to make the pectin? Wish I had thought of it before!
Hi
I was on a juicing diet (Joe cross, fat sick and nearly dead.)
You can also peel the main skin off lemons and juice them, surely this would solve any pectin issue.
: )
So with the original recipe”using the stove to make juice” would you need to use the same amount of sugar? I just juiced 7 cups of apple juice for jelly. With the original way it said 10 cups sugar! This is stronger juice so should I use less?
Hi Lonna,
10 cups sugar for 7 cups juice is definitely a ton of sugar. You can definitely scale back. It won’t affect the safety of the recipe at all. Just to give you an idea, I use one cup of sugar for every cup of juice in my crabapple jelly. That’s because crabapples are fairly tart. When I’m making other types of jelly, I don’t use near as much. I’d look at a few apple jelly recipes to get an idea of how much people normally add; then, start there (or a little under). You can always add more if it doesn’t pass your taste test.
Before pectin was available they used 1:1 ratio, so for ever cup of juice you would use equal cups of sugar.
Cranberry Jam…..can you use cranberries that are still hot from being boiled in a juicer? I want to get one, but not sure how they work, or which one to get. Thanks, Jill
Good question … and I’m afraid I don’t know the answer. Here are a couple thoughts I have. 1) If you juice something hot, it could cause chemicals from the plastic parts of the juicer to leach into your food. 2) I’m not sure how effective a juicer would be at separating the seeds and skins from something as wet as cooked cranberries.
You may find that a fine mesh sieve does a better job. I’ve strained several batches of cranberries for jellied cranberry sauce and cranberry butter this year, and it went pretty quickly.
You might want to consider a steam juicer instead. It’s intended to make juice with steam and separates the skin and seeds of a variety of fruits and veggies.
Thanks so much for this post I have been looking and looking to determine if the juice I make with my omega-3 would be good enough to use in canning jelly
Thank you, Thank you! I was given boxes of blueberries that needed to be picked over for leaves and stems- more than I could handle. So I ran them through the juicer and got a gallon of juice. There was a lot of pulp. it seemed juice. If I tried this again I will run the pulp through again,, I think. I made crab apple jelly with some juice someone gave me and I thought it did not gel- I did use reduced sugar pectin … I love tart jelly. I have used cider and gotten great results. I feel a lot more confident about jam than jelly- especially since I just pulled out all that crab apple to find that it is a jelly now- months later!! It looks like a softer gel…but it is jelly. So the blueberry like really foamy- mostly foam- which can;’t be true. I will take a picture of the process. I am hoping that my mistak/success will be useful. I love your site.
Trading over ur post, I’m 76.
I never threw out the foam…I put it in a bowl t to use on the supper bisquits☺️
From the skins and thicker parts left over I add onions and nuts and make a “conserve” to set beside meats…..🖐🏻☺️
I am wondering why you say you are not able to use the pulp? I have run my apples through the juicer and used the pulp to make perfect apple butter. Now I did pull the seeds first and then juiced them so I am wondering if that is the reason. The apple butter turned out perfect no pectin required and half of the normal time.
I was mostly thinking about the seeds and cores being in the pulp. If you were to run apple slices through the juicer, you could definitely use the pulp to make apple butter, and as you pointed out, it would cook down faster than normal, since you’ve removed a good amount of juice.
Worked great for raspberry jelly. So much faster than food mill. The seeds were so nice to be gone. No more getting them out of our teeth.
Thank You !!
Yay! Glad it worked well for you.
If I peel, slice and core the apples first (I have an apple peeler) could I use the pulp for apple butter?
Absolutely. Whenever I make apple jelly, I use the puree to make a batch of apple butter. Can’t beat getting two products out of one effort 🙂