To distract myself from the mingin’ cold I seem to have developed, I thought I’d tell you about my marmalade. It was very nearly a disaster when I bought the wrong kind of orange – how can there be a wrong kind of orange? On closer inspection of the recipe, after I bought a delicious looking bag of big juicy oranges, I noticed the crucial reference to retaining any pips which contain pectin and makes the marmalade set. Mine were apparently the very best eating oranges – with no pips! I then scoured the house for marmalade recipes and mixed and matched until I came up with the following:
4 navel oranges
2 unwaxed lemons
500ml apple juice
2 1/2l water
2kg jam sugar (with added pectin!)
I followed a pretty standard method involving juicing the fruit over a seive lined with muslin, scooping out the remaining flesh (pith and pips an all) into the muslin. Spend hours finely chopping all the skin and leaving to soak overnight in the fluids with the muslin bag of goodies. Following day I simmered for about 3 hours til the skins were really squishy then removed the muslin and added the sugar.
This is where it all got a bit scientific, but I tried my best to be professional, dolloping gloop onto cold plates in the hope it would wrinkle. I have to say it never really wrinkled as such, but I decided after 25ish minutes, once nearly everything in the kitchen was pretty sticky, it must be about done.
Getting it into the jars was not easy. There was quite alot of scolded fingers and another whole layer of stickiness to contend with, ooo and I didn’t let it cool enough before putting in jars so all the peel floated to the top and I had to try and redistibute when it cooled some more… but, in the end I got 9 jars (not sure the exact quantity as they’re all different sizes) of what looked suspiciously like marmalade!
This morning, I cracked open the first jar – it is sooo delicious. Definitely worth the effort!
February 7, 2009 at 1:17 am
after reading a few recipes i…
chopped the oranges into quarters
scooped out the flesh, pips & pith in one go into a sieve
had water onto boil
put sieve over water and used a meat mallet to squeeze the juice out of the flesh and into the boiling water
put what was left in the sieve into muslim, tied and into pot
chopped peel and added
high simmer for three hours, untill peel was transparent
remove muslim, squeeze over opt
add sugar and half a bottle of pectin
boil untill the mixture is treacaly and dark in clolour, test that it will set
put into jars
February 7, 2009 at 9:50 am
The mallet sounds like an excellent idea, I had a nightmare trying to squeeze the juice out of the muslin. It invloving more scolded fingers and a very messy process trying to squeeze it between 2 spoons. Not sure how effective it was!