How To Make Grape Jelly At Home

Have a bunch of grapes that you need to make into grape jelly? Follow a few simple steps to convert the grapes into grape juice and then a tasty grape jelly.

We usually have a good crop of grapes. We believe they are Concord grapes (not 100% sure).

All we know is that the grapes have tons of seeds in them! Impossible to make into raisins and even eating them fresh is a challenge to spit out all the seeds.

So the best way to use up the grapes is by making either juice or jelly. Jelly is a bit more useful and tastier in my opinion.

Even if you are not a fan of nut butter and jelly toast or sandwiches, you can use the jam as a condiment for various savory dishes.

So let’s start making some grape jelly. I recommend setting aside a full morning or afternoon, especially if you are going to can the jelly as well as we did.

Listen to some great music or podcasts if you wish.

1. Preparing Grapes For Making Jelly

First step is to remove the grapes off the cluster’s branch and give them a bath. We usually fill the sink full of water and pop them in there for a few minutes.

Grapes being washed in a sink full of water

Without scooping up any dirt, we transfer the grapes to our maslin pan. You want to use a pot with a heavy base that heats evenly otherwise you might get burnt jelly.

As an aside we found these Siamese twin grapes!

grapes joined together like Siamese twins

2. Cooking Grapes Into A Jelly

During the whole cooking process, it’s important to keep stirring to avoid having the bottom burn. It’s best to try and pull the grapes from the bottom and lift them to the top of the pot.

Here’s a short video showing the technique. You can also see how the grapes are already starting to break down, losing their skins.

Once the grapes start cooking down they obviously will create juice. At this point we use a potato masher to help break down the grapes so they will release all of their goodness.

Once all the grapes are cooked down and there are no more whole ones, time for straining.

3. Straining Grape Juice For Making Jelly

Now comes the messy part. Make sure to wear an apron or clothes you don’t mind having grape stains in.

You’ll need to strain the grapes through cheesecloth to get rid of the skins and seeds.

Prepare for this by draping a large piece of cheesecloth, doubled up, into a sieve which then gets placed on top of a large pot. We’re using our pasta-cooking and vegetable-steaming pot.

Ladle the hot grapes into the prepare sieve. Be very careful moving the hot grapes as you can burn your hands!

To help the juice extraction along, use the ladle to gently press the mash against the sides and bottom of the cheesecloth-lined sieve.

Stirring grapes in sieve with a ladled to extract juice

Gather up the cheesecloth into a bag and use tongs to gently squeeze the bag to release as much of the juice as possible.

Squeezing juice out of grapes in cheesecloth using a pair of kitchen tongs

Once you think you’ve gotten most of the juice out of the grape must, discard the whole mess. We added it to our green compost bin. We bought cheesecloth that wasn’t bleached, so we also could have put it on our compost.

leftover grape skins and seeds in cheesecloth in a pail

4. Cooking Down Grape Juice To Make Jelly

Now for the time-consuming part. This can take a bit of time. Clean the maslin pan first and then put the juice in it.

Start boiling the juice. A hard boil is best but you need to stick around and keep stirring it.

As foam/scum is created, skim it off with a small ladle. My wife is good at doing this, so I let her do it. Try of course to get only the foam and not any of the juice.