Lemon Jelly, sorta....

If you happen to live in the Sacramento area in the late "winter" using "foraging vision" you will have noted the crazy amount of citrus available to pick almost everywhere!  In January, Tracy and the boys and I went to a friends house and loaded up on mandarin oranges, navel oranges, lemons, limes, and kumquats.  Then the experiments started - maybe I will write about some of those later, but write now I wanted to talk about Lemon Jelly.

I was on a roadtrip for work in mid-March with a gentleman from another company who I work closely with often.  Three hour drive each way to a meeting, of course the subject of foraging came up!  One end result of this conversation being, that when I dropped him off at his house, I got to wander into the back yard and pick a large bag full of Meyer Lemons.

Earlier in the year, with piles of lemons, limes, and oranges, I had tried multiple different methods of putting up citrus.  Not to say that the methods and recipes did not work, but what do you do with 20 pint jars of bitter marmalade?  I ended up dumping out all but four jars and figure I will bring it out as more of a novelty item on occasion, it just does not fit with what we eat on a regular basis.  Same with the orangelemon chutney and orange jelly.  One nice thing, I do make alot of blackberry jam in the summers, so I had squeezed a bunch of lemons and froze them in ice cube trays for use during the summer canning season.  But with 2 gallon bags of lemon cubes, I had to think of another use for this large bag of lemons!

So I decided to make Lemon Jelly - easy enough:

8 cups lemon juice
6 cups sugar
lemon peels in jelly bag -

I boiled the juice with the skins in a bag for pectin content,
added the sugar and removed the peels,

I usually put two plates in the freezer to test the sets of jellies or jams, especially when trying something new like this.  I boiled this for two minutes, tested the set on a plate, and though it set well - jarred it, canned it for ten minutes in the pressure canner at 5 psi, and ended up with 10 jars of lemon syrup...

What happened?  I am not quite sure, but I think I jumped too soon on the plate test and I never had a jelly set, that or I had too much heat in the pressure canner and something went wrong. 

So I ended up with jars of light lemon syrup, I thought about recanning to get the set, but then thought, "how often am I actaully going to want to use lemon jelly?"  Lemon syrup on the other hand, came in really handy over the last couple of months for making homemade margaritas!  So in the end, I did have a successful use of foraged lemons!