Pepper Jelly

This year I have harvested more peppers than I know what to do with.  So far I have made 32 pints of salsa, dried some sliced and whole peppers, frozen five gallon bags literally stuffed with halved peppers and have been eating them fresh as often as I can.  I still have a box full of them on my counter awaiting processing.  While I will probably end up dehydrating more of them, I thought I might try preserving them in yet another form: pepper jelly.

The basic recipe is "Green Pepper Jelly" in the Ball Canning Book.  I had a variety of colors of sweet bell peppers so I thought I would make a batch of each color.  The first step is to put the peppers through a blender to extract the juice for jelly.  The pulp drains through a jelly bag and I used 1 1/2 cups of juice for each batch of jelly.

The next step is to mix the juice with vinegar, lemon juice and pectin and bring it to a boil.

Once boiling, the sugar is added and the mixture needs to be stirred constantly for one minute.  When the jelly begins to gel, I remove it from heat and quickly skim the foam from the top.  From there it goes into hot jelly jars and then back into the water bath to boil for 20 minutes.

When it's done I take the jars out and let them cool for several hours.  Each color pepper made a beautiful jelly, and every batch tasted great!

The book says that this is a savory jelly, but it is sweet enough that I would use it on toast too!  I also imagine that it would make a delicious glaze on roasted chicken or pork.  These jellies are so pretty that I might just add them to gift baskets for the holidays too.