Pectin au Natural (What Apple Species?)

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Countryside : One Thread

All this talk of jellies and jams got me to thinking, does anyone have a list of the best pectin apples? My mother or grandmother had it in a book along time ago as I remember green as in unripe apples are the highest, crabapples even ripe ones are high, and ripe green ones like granny smiths are a little bit lower, sweet apples when ripe are low, But I'm not for sure. Does anybody else know?

-- Thumper (slrldr@aol.com), June 21, 2001

Answers

Hi Thumper (I expect you are the one I see on CHF) My aunt said they used quince for pectin. I think they had a bush or tree or whatever them things grow on. I don't know if they are available as plants anywhere now. Cora-Vee

-- Cora-Vee Caswell (coravee@locl.net), June 21, 2001.

My Great-Aunt Varina and her mother never used commercial pectin when she was young (she's 98 now). She said they just cut up green (unripe) apples and boiled them in the pot with the jelly and jam. She did admit it is not as accurate as the store-bought kind, and you will have to test to see if it has "jelled". Ann K

-- rick K (rick_122@hotmail.com), June 21, 2001.

hi. i told my friend my frustrations with the preserves, and she has an old cookbook with all sorts of pectin mysteries printed in it. she is going to xereox this to me. i'll try and remember to send this on to you when i get it. so i don't forget, email me your address so i'll have it on file when the info arrives. off the topic, are you the thumper tht used to live in bloomington, il?

-- marcee (thathope@mwt.net), June 22, 2001.

I'm just about certain that crabapples have the highest amount of pectin of any apples. That's why so many old recipes exist for crabapple/(other fruit) jams and jellies.

-- Sheryl in ME (radams@sacoriver.net), June 23, 2001.

Crabapples. Very high in pectin, and frankly they make a much more flavorful jelly than any apple jelly I've ever had. Plain ol apple jelly strikes me as insipid by comparison, but maybe that's just me.

I believe quince are also high in pectin. It's a bush but most of what I see offered for sale nowadays are ornamentals. They may set fruit but it'll be small and not much of it. We had a fifty year old quince tree in the backyard of the hundred-year-old house I grew up in. I say "tree" but it was really a bush that had been trained to a tree form. I'm not sure where you might find stock suitable for harvesting fruit from. I'd like to know myself ... Quince honey is what we used the fruit for, and I can't for the life of me remember how we made it.

-- Sojourner (sojournr@missouri.org), June 23, 2001.



Quince is one of the few food plants that I have never used, I have seen them in the market, next time I'll buy some. From my childhood I remember many yards had the large crabapple [fruit size] trees just for makeing jelly, and I agree the flavor is much better than other apples in jelly, and it would often have a soft pink glow to it. I can remember hot summer days sucking on bites of sour crabapples, with a kool-aid chaser, gee, that was a whole lot safer than smoking pot or the other stuff kids do now-a-days.

-- Thumper (slrldr@aol.com), June 29, 2001.

I was trying to find a list of all the fruit with pectins and their levels, and the best I ever found was a list of which fruit had high levels, and which low, but never any exact amount. (Strawberries being low). I do know that Quince and any type of apples have a high content, but Oranges and other citrus fruits are higher in pectin content. As to the apples - the tart/sour they are, the better they jell. Which is probably why cranapples jell faster, along with any of the green/yellow apples, and that underripe fruit have a higher level of pectin in the skin.

-- Roewynne (ce_shurgin@seovec.org), October 22, 2001.

Moderation questions? read the FAQ