We had about twelve more large quince to deal with from the tree. Noel requested quince jelly, so I decided to make the juice today. Here's the canning pot filled up with quartered quince (and a couple small Jonathan apples that I threw in for flavour).
I tried something I need to work on in more detail later: I put the pot full of quince in the oven for half an hour at 350F to get it started on breaking down, then added water and put it on the stove. I think I could have roasted them for longer, as with the marmelada, and it would have been more successful. Anyway, I don't have any more quince to experiment with this year, and I'm certainly not going to buy any, but I'm making notes on what I want to try next year.
To make quince jelly you simmer the fruit until it breaks down into a mush. My metric is that I should be able to break the fruit apart with a wooden spoon without really working hard. That was about an hour of simmering, on top of the half hour of roasting. You don't want to cook it too fast or you'll break down the pectin.
When you've got the quince nicely cooked, it starts to resemble a really nasty applesauce with seeds and cores in it. The next time I do this I will put it through the food mill at this stage and maybe come up with something to do with a giant pile of quince sauce. I think the juice will be better from a milled sauce.
Here's my jelly bag setup: a nice strong muslin pillowcase-cum-jelly bag (my desire is to buy a real jelly bag sometime in the future, possibly more than one if I'm going to be making this much juice at once), hung by wires from the pot hooks over the sink, set up to drip into the washed-out canning pot. The collander is there in case the bag falls, to keep it from going ker-splash into the juice.
I leave the jelly bag to drip for 24 hours. Tomorrow evening, Noel will dump the remains in the compost bin (these fruit remains are AMAZING on the compost), then bottle up the juice for me to turn into jelly the next time I have a free afternoon. Which would be in, oh, January.
