While July to November is officially apple-picking season, you can thankfully purchase apples all year round. But with all the hype around the fruit themselves, we can be quick to throw away the peels and the cores, mistakenly deeming them useless. However, there is an easy way you can not only lessen your food waste but get even more flavorful use out of your apples.
The delicious way to do this is through making jelly. Apple jelly is simple to make, easily preserved and tastes amazing. The beauty of this creation is that it works with any type of apple so you can experiment with different kinds and see which flavor suits you best.
By saving your cores and peels and storing them in a separate container, you can combine them with a few other basic pantry ingredients to bring new life to these frequently composted parts of the fruit. Making jelly from your apple cores If you're planning to make the jelly immediately after using the rest of the apple for another recipe you can dump the scraps straight into a pot for boiling. Otherwise, keep them in a clean, airtight container in the fridge until you are ready to use them.
By boiling the scraps you'll release the natural flavor from the cores and peels, so you can strain the juice out once they're cooked. Another thing that gets strained along with the juice is the natural pectin that is stored in the scraps of your apples. Pectin, which can be bought in stores, is a naturally occurring vegan alternative to gelatin that is perfe.