Lime Jelly

2013 Update: Cooked for a much shorter time, looks and tastes more like true lime.

Limes are by far my favorite citrus. I use lemons more often, as I have a tree in the garden, but limes always feel like a treat.  Even as a child, lime was my favorite Sweet Tart or lollipop flavor. When people talk about their love for meyer lemons, and many talk about that love, I think of limes. 

So, when Lisa and I emailed about a January canning project a few days after Mariquita offered limes as an addition to their Mystery Boxes, I was determined to can limes. A search of both the internet and my stash of canning books seemed to steer me towards marmalade. But, to be honest, although I like marmalade, I wanted something less bitter and more, well, lime. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted lime jelly. 

More googling came up with many gelatin based desserts and surprisingly few jelly recipes. Expanding my search to lemon gave me more results and a lot of recipes for honey-lemon-jelly. That sounded lovely, but it also seemed that honey would mask the lime flavor I was after. It was clearly time to experiment.

First off: squeeze the limes. We ended up with about 6 cups of juice from 10 pounds of limes. We used the extra cup to make lime curd.  

Recipe:

5 cups lime juice

3 1/2 cups water

7 1/2 cups sugar

2 (3 ounce) envelopes liquid pectin

Squeeze limes and measure 5 cups of juice into a saucepan. Add water and sugar and bring to a boil. Continue cooking until the mixture reaches 220 degrees. Add the liquid pectin and allow to boil for 10 more minutes. 

Funnel the jelly into jars and process for five minutes in a boiling water canner.

Lime Curd

Turns out that if you don't add food coloring, your lime jelly looks kind of like apple juice.