I have used the enzyme for wine making. Many fruits and berries just have way too much natural pectin and if you add the enzyme, they will never set up on their own, no matter how much sugar is added. If you still want a controlable syru, add a little Clear Jel and mix it with a little water and make a slurry. Pour a little in while the juice is boiling. It should be the right thickness once you determine how much of teh modifed food starch to use. If you have recipes that mention corn starch as a thickener for syrups, use less Clear Jel. Clear Jel in home canning is also much safer to use home canning compared to regular corn starch. Some of my grape based wines like port, needed to have a bit more 'body', so I would add a banana to the must. Pineapple or papya (papian) is also a meat tenderizer and is the prime ingredient in Adolphs meat tenderizer. Added to beef and allow it to marinate 24 hours will give you mush as opposed to meat. Adding citric, or better yet, the acid blend of tarteric, malic, and citric is a better choice to improve acidity of fruit juices. Its found at the same place the pectic enzyme comes from.

Maybe add this 'spent' fruit just before the time its almost ready to be poured into jars. Raspberry plants are produced by runners that send up new canes every year. First year canes are leaves only, but in the second year they produce berries. After that, they die off. Adding waste raspberry seeds will usually not give you more plants. I had runners sprout up more than 10 feet from my canes. Also have a few blackberry canes, and they seem to be just keeping to themselves, and don't travel much. Some blackberry or black raspberry canes will root from the tips of the canes. At that time, new canes emerge from that initial rooting. Imagine both ends of a blackberry cane growing in the same soil near each other. Which end do you pull up? I use an organic fruit tree fertilizer and its given me many red raspberries every picking season. The fert is from Gardens Alive and is their maintenance fertilizer. There is also a 'build up' formula, but that was only needed to get the nearby fruit trees to grow healthy. Both contain a necessary trace element called boron, which should neer be used on anything but fruit trees. The boron helps the fruits to have a fully developed, with no ungrown patches. Also, it can correct deformed strawberries, but is only lightly applied every 2-3 years.

It's chokecherry season again and I'm glad I checked back in here - GW doesn't forward messages anymore for some reason. Thanks Linda - of course, that makes sense. I'm going to use half the sugar. The batch we made last fall was sneakily powerful - so delicious you forget you're drinking nearly pure vodka - makes you feel ready for a winter on the Steppes. Not good to send guests home reeling though.

I like the sound of that and will be trying it - thanks a lot! I'm glad you took notes as you winged it. I'll let you know how it works for me. Thanks again!