Tag Archives: marmalade

Friday food links – 26 Feb 2016

Sliced bergamot lemons for marmalade

I had a few days of holiday to use up before the end of March, so I took two days off this week to do some work on the blog. I hope to move the whole thing to a new design soon, and to add some new feaetures – watch this space (but don’t hold your breath!). It also gave me the opportunity to spend an extended time in the kitchen, without toddler interruptions.

On Tuesday I put two ham hocks (bought from the farm shop near my mum and dad’s house) in the slow-cooker. The meat slipped easily from the bones after spending all day in the pot, and that was dinner, with some boiled potatoes, wilted Savoy cabbage, and a little bit of spring onion sauce from this Mark Hix recipe. On Thursday afternoon, I squirreled myself away with Adele and Kendrick Lamar to make soda bread, bergamot marmalade, ham hock soup and tea loaf.

This week, I also got two new food magazines: the latest issues of Bon Appetit and Delicious. I currently subscribe to both, but this month showed a particularly stark difference, and I why I’m moving from the former to the latter. Bon Appetit is the main food magazine in the U.S., since its stable-mate, Gourmet, was shut down. I used to enjoy reading about American food trends, which are usually ahead of the UK, and hearing about different cookbooks and restaurants. But it’s become so on-trend, I no longer find it interesting. I think I’ve bookmarked just three recipes from this issue, one of which is simply a serving suggestion for a platter of spring vegetables with olive oil. I feel less and less like I’m in the audience for this one. When ‘delicious’ arrived today, however, I’ve immediately started planning meals and dishes, and have a version of their Easter roast pork in the fridge tonight.

Recipes:

Without a recipe:

  • Meatballs and tomato sauce over rice
  • Beef stew leftovers
  • Slow cooker ham hock with potatoes and cabbage
  • Friday night pizza

Reading:

Friday food links – 6 Feb 2015

I really was just going to make a *small* batch of marmalade... Oops.

This has been a week of marmalade. I set out to made this ‘Good morning’ breakfast marmalade recipe with some blood oranges that were lurking in the fridge, along with lemons and a pink grapefruit. Despite conscientious pectin extraction from the membranes, and boiling twice, it still hasn’t set (I suspect because I didn’t have the crucial Seville oranges). So now I need some good recipes for marmalade syrup. These marmalade brownies are high up the list, as well as a marmalade and coconut bakewell tart from delicious magazine. I also plan to tackle some sort of marmalade granola (maybe this one). Next time, I’ll go back to my June Taylor recipes, even if she does make you segment all the fruit.

Recipes this week:

Without a recipe:

  • Spice Tailor Keralan coconut curry with fish, peas and sweet potato
  • Leftover braised beef ragu over pasta
  • Tomato sauce and Grandma Turano’s meatballs from the freezer
  • Burritos with black beans, avocado and grilled chicken

Reading:

Friday food links – 5 Dec 2014

A good deal of chopping for this afternoon's cooking, so time to get the good knife out

Last weekend featured some cooking to last through the week – a slow-cooked beef shin ragu, a chicken curry with lentils, and working on the Justin Gellatly sourdough recipe (which was baked on Monday). Very pleased to have reactivated my elderly, frozen sourdough starter, and hoping that I can keep it going with some more loaves through December.

Seville orange marmalade

Untitled

I have made marmalade a number of times, with some notable successes as well as notable failures. I have had everything from a dark brown orange syrup to a set so thick you could bounce things off it. No one seems to have the same recipe, and several of them flat-out contradict each other. Nigel Slater, in the Kitchen Diaries II, at least acknowledges that every marmalade maker has their own peculiarities and that none of them can agree.

Marmalade making requires getting three things right: enough pectin in the mixture to create a gel; a balance of sugar, acid and pectin that will enable the gel to set at room temperature; and cooking the peel through enough to make it edible and not too chewy. There are a huge number of routes that you can take to get to this end result, and most regular marmalade-makers will have a preferred route, as well as desired result. Some are aiming for a tawny, caramel-tinged, dark marmalade with hearty chunks; others a light, clear jelly with threads of peel through it.

My real conversion to marmalade making was discovering June Taylor’s approach. Although recipes from her are frustratingly hard to track down, her handmade approach and attention to detail have produced stellar results when I have tried them – a softly set bright orange jelly with an amazing fresh flavour. This comes (I think) from a much lower-than-normal amount of sugar in her recipes, as well as a time consuming process which involves segmenting the fruit, and removing the membranes into a bag with the pips, so they can contribute pectin, but not cloud the jelly.

With marmalade, you have to balance the simplicity of making it with your satisfaction with the end result. How far are you willing to go? If you’re ready to make your own marmalade, we can safely assume you’re willing to go quite a long way, but segmenting each orange is a very different amount of active effort needed, compared to boiling the fruit whole and then chopping it all up. But for me, it comes down to how happy I will be with the end result. I am almost incapable of throwing away food that I have spent large chunks or time or money preparing, so if I end up with 5 jars of not-very-good marmalade, I know from experience that they will sit in the cupboard for a long, long time while I reluctantly work my way through them. If they are not great, I won’t want to give them away either, making their stay in the cupboard even longer.

I would rather spend an extra half hour on preparation to end up with a sparkling result that I’m incredibly proud of and can’t wait to share with other people. That, to me, is a much better reward for my time than a few jars of dark and muddy orange-flavoured jam.

Having tried a tangerine and grapefruit recipe before, with good results, I decided to try and work out what a June Taylor-style Seville orange marmalade recipe might look like. This was a tricky task, as she doesn’t make Seville orange marmalade at all – it’s one of very few citrus fruits that you never see in California. So I read through quite a few alternative approaches, as well as some blog entries that had also attempted to replicate her approach, to see if I could come up with something appropriate.

I started with her recipe for Thick cut orange marmalade, published in the San Francisco Chronicle. However, as this was a recipe for the thinner-skinned, juicier sweet oranges, I felt that I would need to modify it somewhat. One of the things I particularly liked about the tangerine and grapefruit recipe is that you get to slice across the segments, creating juicy chunks of citrus flesh with peel attached, which survive into the finished jam. However, doing this for all the oranges seemed like it would both take too long and leave me with way too much peel in the final result. I have tried making marmalade with whole oranges before (the method where you boil them whole, and then chop them) and have found that with the thick peels, you get far too much peel for my liking.

So I took a hybrid approach, slicing one lemon and one blood orange in segments with the skin on, and removing the peel before segmenting for the Seville oranges. As I did this, I removed the (copious) pips and, on Dan Lepard’s advice, popped them straight into a small dish of water. By the time I had finished the fruit preparation, this little bowl had gelled solid, demonstrating just how much pectin there is in those pips.

The final fiddly thing I did was to take the pieces of orange peel, and blanch them. I’m sure this stage is not essential, but I thought it worth doing for two reasons: one, when making candied peels, you are almost always asked to blanch the peel, sometimes repeatedly, to ‘remove bitterness’. I thought the same thing might apply here. It would also give them a headstart on softening, making it easy to slice them, and ensuring that I could cook the rest of the mixture for a fairly short period – something that’s important if you want to preserve a fresh, citrus flavour rather than aiming for a caramel one. So these were blanched, drained, about half of them sliced finely and added to the fruit. I kept the rest back to make candied peel with.

Candied orange peel

Recipe: Seville orange marmalade

This does make a rather acidic marmalade – something to really wake you up. If you are partial to chewing pieces of candied orange peel, it should be right up your street. If you prefer a sweeter marmalade, you may want to increase the sugar.

  • 1.5 kg Seville oranges (I ordered mine from Riverford organics)
  • 1 lemon
  • 1 blood orange (not essential – I happened to have one leftover)
  • 1.7kg of fruit in all
  • 600ml water
  • 750g granulated sugar

Segment the blood orange and the lemon, with the skin on and slice thinly.
Top and tail the seville oranges. Slice off the peel taking as little pith with it as possible. Then slice off the pith, exposing the flesh. Collect the strips of pith in the muslin. Segment the Seville oranges, removing the pips into a small bowl of water as you go. Squeeze any juice from the membranes that are left into the same bowl as the segments and the sliced segments, and then add the membranes to the muslin with the pith.

First boil

Take the strips of peel and cover with cold water in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil for 2 minutes, and then drain and cool.
Slice about half of them into thin strips and add to the juice and segments.
Leave overnight.

The next day, wash your jam jars thoroughly (or put them in the dishwasher) and then place into a 110C degree oven to keep warm. Wash the lids at the same time, but leave them out of the oven.

Add the pips to the muslin, and their soaking water to the fruit in a preserving pan. Tie the muslin up with string and suspend it in the pan. Bring everything to a boil for about half an hour, to make sure the peel is really tender. It should be possible to mash it between finger and thumb. Take off the heat and remove the muslin bag. When it is cool enough to handle (after about 30 minutes), squeeze it out to release the pectin and add into the pan of fruit. You need to squeeze and massage this for a good few minutes to extract as much pectin as possible. This takes some time, but is strangely satisfying.

Pectin from pips

When you have squeezed out all the pectin you can, add a candy thermometer to the pot, add the sugar and bring back to a boil. Stir occasionally until the sugar has dissolved (it will stop making a scratchy noise on the pan as you stir) and then let it bubble quite fast until it reaches 105C on the thermometer, then test for a set.

Boiling with sugar

Pour the whole lot immediately into a Pyrex jug, and then into the hot jars. Using a tea towel, screw on the lids and inverted each jar for five minutes before returning them to the right way up to finish cooling. This helps to ensure the lids and surface are sterilised and prevents anything growing on the surface.

In search of a sparkling marmalade

marmalade-jar

Marmalade has been a bit of a problem area for me. I have made jars and jars of it over the years (many of which are still in the cupboard), but seldom made one I’ve really been satisfied with. I’ve made ones with more peel than jam, that are very hard to spread, and others that are more of a caramelised orange syrup – boiled so long and hard that the sugar caramelised, but it never really set.

The pectin you need to set the marmalade comes from the peel, pith, membranes and seeds. There is a very easy recipe that has you boil the oranges whole, to get all that pectin going, then cool and chop them up, before adding the sugar and boiling to set. However, including all of this makes for a very lumpy recipe, which is ultimately a bit unsatisfying to spread on your toast.

I searched around, and came across June Taylor, an englishwoman living in Berkeley, who makes much-loved preserves distributed in the Bay Area. These sounded like just the sort of thing to aspire to – clear, colourful marmalade, with the taste of the fruit.

Fortunately, June has been generous with her time on more than one occasion, and I found a few sources to help me. Most helpful of all was a video on Chow, which shows clearly all her techniques:

Video: June Taylor and her marmalade – Chow

The New York Times: Jelly’s Last Jam

The San Francisco Chronicle: Jars of marmalade dance in her head

I took my recipe from the last one, but halved it – because I really couldn’t see myself getting through 12lbs of marmalade. The big difference between June’s recipes and other marmalade recipes I have seen is that she segments all the fruit – removing the fruit flesh from the membranes and skin. Now, I’m not pretending this is going to be easy – it’s very time consuming to do – it probably took me 1.5 to 2 hours to prepare all the fruit for this. But I did end up with a beautiful orange jelly, that set just perfectly. So it may be worth it if that’s what you’re after.

marmalade-on-muffin

Tangerine and Grapefruit Marmalade

  • 1kg pink grapefruit
  • 2 kg tangerines (I used a combination of tangerines, mandarins and a couple of oranges)
  • 90 ml lemon juice (3 or 4 lemons-worth)
  • 1 kg granulated sugar
  • 600ml water
  • Wash all the fruit – scrub the peel with soap.
  • Take 4 of the nicest-looking, least-blemished tangerines. Top and tail the peel from them, and segment with the peel on, then slice into thin slices across the segment.
  • Take the remaining fruit, top and tail them, and then cut off the peel in curve from the top to the bottom. Segmenting an orange is quite tricky to describe, so instead of trying, you’re best off with an instructional video or a series of photos.
  • Place all the segments and juice into a large, wide pan, with the lemon juice and water.
  • Place all the membranes and seeds into a square of muslin or a jelly bag, and tie it up with string. Use the string to suspend the bag into the pan in the juice.
  • Put the pan onto the heat and bring to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes.
  • Lift the bag out onto a plate until cool enough to handle. Stir the sugar into the hot fruit to dissolve. When the bag has cooled, squeeze it over the pan to extract the pectin – a cloudy, smooth, thick substance. Massage and squeeze the bag for 5-10 minutes to extract as much as possible – this is what will make it set. Put a couple of saucers or small plates into the fridge.
  • Bring the pan back to the boil and simmer for 30-45 minutes, testing for a set after 25 minutes. If you have a sugar thermometer, it should reach 106C/222F. Test for a set by dripping a little on a refrigerated plate, and put back into the fridge to chill. If you can mound it up so it looks like an egg yolk, or it gets a wrinkle on the surface when you push across it, it is ready.
  • Use a ladle or a measuring jug to pour the hot marmalade into clean, hot, sterilised jars (sterilise by washing in very hot soapy water, or running through a dishwasher, then drying in an oven at 130C).

Blood Orange Marmalade



marmalade.JPG
Originally uploaded by louise_marston.

I have something of a glut of citrus fruit at the moment, courtesy of my weekly organic box from Abel and Cole, so my thoughts turned to marmalade. Although traditionally made with the sour Seville orange, it is also possible to use sweet oranges, especially if you up the acid and pectin content by adding lemons to the mix.

Marmalade is nothing more than orange jam, but the traditional recipe, originating in Dundee, requires two particular things – the afore-mentioned Seville orange, and finely or thickly sliced orange zest. The word marmalade comes from the portguese marmelada, which originally described a quince jam something like quince cheese or membrillo. Like quinces, citrus fruits are rich in pectin, the substance that sets jams and jellies into that particular firm and quivering consistency.

Basic marmalade principles are the same as those for other jams:
• Extract the maximum pectin. This is usually done by gathering the pips from the fruit, sometimes also the pulp and pith, in a muslin bag and boiling it with the juice before removing it and squeezing the bag to extract the soluble pectin.
• Ensure there is plenty of acid. This helps to extract the maximum pectin and gives a better set. Extra lemon juice is often used for this, but it’s not a particular problem for marmalade.
• Dissolve sugar completely before bringing the fruit and sugar mixture to a boil. This helps to prevent crystallisation

The aim is to extract pectin, and then to make a 60-65% sugar solution with the fruit by boiling off the water until this setting point is reached. I based this recipe on one for Sweet Orange Marmalade from Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine, adding a step to increase the pectin, as suggested in other recipes.

2 lemons
2 small pink grapefruit
9 blood oranges
500g granulated sugar

Zest the lemons, one grapefruit and 3 of the oranges using a vegetable peeler to remove just the zest. Finely julienne the zest.

Juice all the fruit. There should be just over 1 litre.

Add the pips, pith and remaining flesh from the fruit into a square of muslin. Add this to a pan of water and boil for 45 minutes. Leave to soak overnight.

The next morning, squeeze all the pectin from the muslin and add with the water to the juice, zest and sugar in a large pan. Heat gently to dissolve the sugar, then bring to a simmer and boil for 1.5 hours, or until temperature reaches 104 degrees C. Start testing the set on a cold saucer, looking for a wrinkle on the surface when it is pushed.

Let cool for 15 minutes or so before putting into sterilised jars (this helps make sure all the zest doesn’t float to the top).

This looks beautiful, and is quite tart because of the grapefruit. It’s possible that it would have benefited from the zest being blanched before adding to the marmalade to remove some of the bitterness.

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