If wine’s your jam, you might want to try and turn your vino into an actual jam. Or jelly. It’s a great way to use up a bottle of wine that’s been open a little too long or one that you didn’t find particularly quaffable.
The process involves a simple list of ingredients. For jam, you’ll need wine, sugar, fruit and sometimes pectin depending on the recipe. For jelly, it’s mainly just wine, sugar and pectin.
While you can certainly buy wine jelly and jam, like the kind seen below posted to Twitter by Larder & Cupboard …
Pass the cheese, please!
#WineJelly #SpreadLove pic.twitter.com/Dz87o6qV8t
— Larder & Cupboard (@Larder_Cupboard) September 18, 2020
… it’s not too difficult to make your own.
Not only can you use up extra wine with wine jam, you can throw in fruit that’s past its prime as well.
Stacey Ballis at MyRecipes has a simple recipe for creating wine jam. Though she says you can use any wine and any fruit, if you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea to mix red wine with red fruits and white with paler fruits.
Ballis’ wine jam ingredients ratio is one part wine to two parts sugar and two parts fruit by total volume. If you’d like to use pectin for a thicker jam, put in a half ounce for every two cups of fruit.
You’ll definitely want to read the full recipe before you get started, but the directions are pretty simple. First, you’ll mix the wine and sugar into a pot and heat it on the stove. You can also add spices or lemon according to your taste. Once the liquid is reduced, add your fruit. (If you’re using pectin, you’ll cook for a few minutes before adding the pectin.) The liquid will slowly thicken into a syrupy texture.
Once the wine jam is cooked, pour it into sterilized jars and cool.
Unlike jam, wine jelly won’t have any added fruit and will be less seedy and chunky — more like the consistency of Jell-O. AllRecipes has a popular recipe for this, which involves mixing wine, lemon and pectin, adding sugar and then boiling.
You can enjoy either wine jam or jelly any time of day as the alcohol is burned off during the cooking process. It goes great with cheese, on pancakes, toast and in desserts. And although drinking in the morning isn’t necessarily good for you, you can have wine jam for breakfast if you like.
Cheers!
This story originally appeared on Simplemost. Check out Simplemost for additional stories.
