 Valley Cooks and we are making blackberry desserts. If you don't like the seeds in blackberries of course you would strain them out but we love them. So let's get started. We are starting our jelly. The first thing we're going to do is measure our berries and our sugar into a large pot. Up the berries and we're just going to measure. I haven't even married sure to see how many berries I have. There's one, two, three. Now these red ones in there, mama always done that. We got some berries from our yard and they're beautiful. I'm going to show you how I washed the berries and I actually poured every single one of these into the seed because they had Japanese beetles, they had a spot, they had some spiders, they had some ants by the time we got them home. So you pour them all out in the sink and I've got these in a pot right now to show y'all. But anyway you cover them with water. When you cover them with water and you slosh them around everything starts floating to the top including the buds. Then you can skim them off the top and then pick your berries up, run them under the water and then wash them and then you've washed your berries. Now I'm going to show you how pretty these are. These are out of our yard. They're gorgeous, they're sweet, they taste so much better than the wild ones. The wild ones are a little better. We're going to have, including our berries from the yard, we're going to have about 12 cups. Okay? With a little extra but it's not going to hurt to say 12. Now we're going to use three quarters of a cup, per cup of berries. And so that would be eight would be six, eight, nine cups of sugar. Okay, eight cups of sugar. Now I've got so many berries compared to the strawberries I had. I don't think I'm going to add water like I did with the strawberries. All I'm going to do is add my sugar to it and it will form a syrup. Let me dry out this so I can measure in my sugar. Now we love the seeds and stuff in Blackberry Jam. In my family, we're going to get plenty more Blackberries, so I'll probably make some actual jam instead of preserves out of the rest of them. Or put them up in the freezer for cobblers, and I'm not going to use any of these for cobblers today. I've got two cobbler videos if you're interested in how I make Blackberry Cobbler. One has dumplings in it like mommy used to make. The other does it. They're both on YouTube. All right, let's start measuring our sugar. There's a leaf in there. There's one, two, seven. Save this. This is going to boil. I'm going to transfer this into, and we're going to start it to boil. We transferred those berries over to a taller pot. So you really want to use some tall because they are going to boil a lot and they're going to rise up and try to boil over. Anyway, we put them on the stove. You do not want to start it at a high temperature. Start it down on a very low simmer and let that sugar start to melt. So do not do this. Make sure you got it all the way down on low, or just barely above low so that the sugar can just gradually melt. Don't force it. This is a slow cooking method. It is good. You don't have to use the sugar gel. It's just the old-fashioned way. Great-great-great grandmother did it. Your mother may have done them this way. My mom did. So we're doing it the old-fashioned, old- timer way. All right, this is starting to come to a very slow boil. It's probably taking it a good 12 to 15 minutes. I mean, it's just a slow boil. You should start it out really, really slow. Okay, we've been letting this simmer like this at this boil for 10 minutes. So it's not even close to being thick enough. It's still real runny. So what we're going to do is start turning up the heat, because we know for sure that that sugar has melted good in our preserves. So what's turned it up, bring up the heat. And this is when you have to start watching it or to boil over the top of the boiler. So just watch it once if it gets too high and stir it and keep it from boiling over the top. This is the point where you got to stand here and just wait on it. I like to use a little salt in my preserves. It will make them a little cloudy if you don't get a salt that's anti-caking. This one has an anti-caking agent in it, but I use it anyway because it is a kosher salt. If you have time to go grocery store and get some salt that just says salt, it's better to use that. It was obvious that I couldn't boil it hot enough without it overflowing. So I halved it so that I could turn the temperature up. Now we're going to test this over here in our water. And you can see that some of it started to cling together when it hits. So it's almost there. Real close. Real, real close. And you just have to keep testing it. I'm going to put a little bit out on this so that it, so I can test it here. And it's it's gelling. I think I can turn it off. When it hits the water, there's some of it that's sitting on the top of the water. And let it cool a second. Get another spoon. Scrape it off the spoon. You don't need to get the top part. You need to get the part that just come out of the gel, out of the pot. I wound up boiling it in about three minutes once I transferred it all. Now I'm going to put this in the refrigerator real quick because it's almost sealed. Then we're going to take it out and just see if it's the consistency I want it to be. But I think it's going to be. And if it is, we're going to pour it up in these jars real quick. Oh yeah. It's almost, I'm afraid I might have got it too sticky. It's almost candied. I think it's going to be perfect. I don't think it's going to be candied. Show me. It's boiling again. I want it to be kind of in a boil when I pour it up because I don't want, I want it to seal. I want the jars to seal. Let me move this. Flip my jars anyway so it shouldn't matter, okay? So here we are pouring this up. And I got, I got that blackberry jam on the stove. It's going to be hard to clean up. You're trying not to get it on the rim but you put it in the jar and like I didn't get any jelly on that rim. I put the lid on it. Now these are ball jars and ball lids which are better than the ones I had the other day. They were some off brim. We're gonna flip it upside down. You can do this with jelly. Probably leave it upside down at least 20 minutes, okay? And that way temperature that's right. I'm gonna take this off on my finger and kind of show y'all that it's, it's about just right. It's about like a jelly. So that's perfect. It's gonna be good. I love this stuff. Chris don't even like it y'all. Oh my goodness it's so good. Morning made biscuits so we could eat our new jelly. I wanted to show y'all what about what the consistency of the jelly is. So I'm gonna open up a couple of biscuits and put on some butter without the sure gel or extra pectin. So I think it's just right myself. I want to show y'all what it looked like. You can see the seeds are in it because that's how we like it. Chris don't like blackberry and he usually don't like the seeds but he ate this this morning and he said it was delicious. Now I just wanted y'all to see these biscuits this morning. I hope y'all like the look so. We sure loved eating them. Wonderful day. Thanks for watching Colored Valley Cooks. Love y'all. Bye.