Wild Grapes

For a little bit different take on foraging and wild foods, I went out and harvested some wild grapes (Riverbank Grapes) - Vitis riparia
.

This is the first year for me to try and do something with this fruit. It seems wherever you look while walking the trails there is a blue tinge in the bush - abundance of wild grapes.

[caption id="attachment_2726" align="alignnone" width="663"] Amazing abundance[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_2727" align="alignnone" width="663"] Amazing abundance[/caption]

It is probably happening every year, but I simple did not notice or did not pay attention. The taste of the grape itself varies, mainly being quite sour. That makes perfect trail side snack, very refreshing and thirst quenching. A little bit of reading shows that wild grapes were widely use by natives. Their technique was to wait for the first frost to harvest. Apparently freezing improves sweetness. Well, I am not waiting, at least not this year.

After recruiting some help (my wife Linda) I went to the trails. The harvest itself was very easy and relatively quickly we filled our baskets.

[caption id="attachment_2729" align="alignnone" width="663"] Linda and grapes[/caption]

That was the easy part. Now the grapes needed to be stemmed. That was long and slow process. Later I found some sources claiming to cook the whole thing together with stems. Maybe when dealing with greater quantities this technique is worth trying. The result was around 3kg of fruit.

Now, reading and researching what to make of it I found a great number of recipes for wild grape jelly. My problem with those is amount of sugar used. Using 6 cups of berries and 4 cups of sugar seems to me quite excessive. I understand usage of pectin to help set the preserve (berries usually do not have enough pectin on their own). On the other hand, a little runny preserve is quite OK as far as I am concerned.

I decided to improvise. In the big pot I combined fruit (3kg) 2 cups of organic sugar and turned up the heat. As the mixture heated, I crushed grapes with flat metal spoon. It should be pointed out that grapes contain a lot of seeds. After mixture boiled and all grapes were crushed, I used my primitive hand food processor to eliminate seeds and skins.

That worked quite good and yielded approximately 2,5 l of pulpy juice. Now I added a bag of liquid pectin (in the hindsight I should have probably used two bags on this amount of juice). Cooking on medium heath for some 20 min reduced the liquid to some extent. I guess further cooking would eliminate more water and facilitate setting of the end product.

I poured hot liquid into clean mason jars (the yield was 4X500ml jars exactly) and processed in boiling water for 15min. After jars were removed from the bath, they cooled on the tea towel.

In the morning the preserve looked a little bit runny, but taste is excellent without overpowering sweetness. How it will hold on the shelf, the time will tell.