Sea Buckthorn Berry Jelly

The cliff tops of Cromer and Sheringham are jewelled with sea buckthorn berries at the moment. My sister and I had been talking about foraging for the gorgeous orange berries for years and never got round to it, so a few years ago we set some time aside to pick some and made some delicious sea buckthorn berry jelly.

We’ll walk right up to the top of the cliff through the spiky gorse bushes, sit on a bench for a few minutes to catch our breath and admire the view before we start our forage…

Now, we’ve found our bushes and the picking begins!

We’d heard about the thorns of the sea buckthorn bushes but luckily they seemed to just be soft floppy thorns so picking wasn’t easy but not painful other than the odd acidic squirt in the eye. We took gardening gloves with us and found a good system of one of us holding the bag while the other ‘milked’ the branches of berries. Some berries burst, but we collected the juice in our bag too. Next time we’ll take hand wipes and kitchen roll to wipe our sticky hands and faces.

Back at home, we sorted through the berries to get rid of bugs and leaves. At this point the berries didn’t smell that great – a bit like sickly, sour wine. We mixed with 0.5 times the amount of water to weight of berries (eg. 1kg berries to 500ml water).

We gently brought the berries to the boil and simmered away for around 20 minutes.

We strained the berries through a sieve.

We also strained through a muslin cloth as there seemed to be some residue that had come off the skins of the berries. Stirring and encouraging the juice through the muslin quickened the process!

Squeezing the juice through the muslin.

We measured the strained juice and added 1.5 times the amount of sugar (eg 500ml juice to 750gm sugar). Then boiled vigorously for about 10 minutes then reduced heat to a rolling boil, stirring every so often to avoid the jelly catching on the bottom of the pan.

Now if all this seems like a bit too much hassle, or you don't live near any sea buckthorn berry bushes you can just buy the juice. I've found a Scottish company selling it: The Scottish Fruit Company but have also found a few options to buy on amazon... Erbology offers a 250ml bottle for 7.99 and a 35 gram powder for 5.99. I like the look of the Stockholm Organic 500ml bottle for £15.90 which should give you enough to make a good few jars of jelly!

Would love to hear how you get on if you give the recipe a go!