How to find pectin in your fruit and use it to provide the right combination for your jelly
This story is part of the feature 'Preserves Season: Berry Jelly', part of a four-part series on preserving fruit at home called 'LA in a Jar'.
As RuPaul sang in his 2012 song "Peanut Butter", "It must be jelly, because jam don't shake." In fruit preserves, at least, this milkshake refers to pectin.
Similar to gelatin or carrageenan, which come from animals and seaweed respectively, pectin is the substance in the cell walls of many fruits that gives them their hardness. In other words, their bones. This substance leaches out of the fruit when cooked, causing the cooked liquid to magically solidify into a shaky gel.
Certain fruits contain large amounts of pectin - green apples, lemons, cranberries, plums - while others are very low in pectin, such as blueberries, cherries or pears. When making jam or fruit butter, the presence of pectin does not necessarily affect the success of the final product, as the puree, mash or purée provides most of the body and thickness of the finished jam or butter. However, when making jam or jelly, the key is to obtain a final preserves with the right balance of pectin and sugar to achieve a pleasantly shaken but still scoopable and spreadable texture. When using fruits with a low pectin content, it is best to add fruits with a high pectin content to the mixture so that you can find the right balance, as with blackberry jelly with amaro.
Many fruit preservatives use pectin powder, which is similar to powdered animal gelatine because it is pure and can be dissolved in a liquid simply to make jelly from the juice. But because the pastime of making jelly is a craft worth doing in a primitive way, I like to use green apple or orange peel - like most scratch preservatives - to provide the necessary pectin for any jelly or jam, respectively.
This involves boiling the apple or orange peel in water for a few hours until the last bit of pectin has been removed from their cell walls. Once the resulting liquid has been drained and cooled, you will have what many conservators refer to as "raw pectin", which you can then add to the fruit that needs it to make certain jams, jellies and marmalades.
