American Beautyberries, sometimes known as French Mulberries, will be ripening in the next month or so in the South. Look for bright, fuchsia-colored clumps of berries and be prepared to do a lot of picking for a batch of jelly. You will need 6 cups of berries for one batch of jelly. Because of the size, it will take about an hour of pretty fast picking. The ripe berries come off their little green stems as you gently pull with your fingers.
Insects will probably be hiding in the middle of the clusters of berries. Let them soak in a bucket of water to encourage unwanted visitors to leave. After soaking for a while, drain the berries and wash and rinse a few more times before preparing the juice for jelly.
Using a steam juicer to juice beautyberries makes juicing much faster and yields more juice than cooking the fruit and draining through cheesecloth. Steam juice the beautyberries for 1 hour. You can pour the cooled juice into a jar to make jelly later or make the jelly immediately. Six cups of berries yields 3 cups of juice. The juice is not bright pink as you would expect. It looks dark brown but looks can be deceiving. The jelly turns out to be a beautiful dark ruby red.
Beautyberry jelly is very mild and not too sweet tasting. One man quoted in a Houston Chronicle newspaper article compared the jelly to rose petal jelly but more complex. It’s mild enough that peanut butter would probably overpower it, but it is very good on biscuits.
Find the recipe for Beautyberry Jelly here.
