Soft set strawberry jam

Jun18

I have a very neglected strawberry patch. When we first changed our garden to create space to plant vegetables, I planted five Cambridge Favourite strawberry plants along with the lettuces and tomatoes. Since then, I have been very inattentive and have let them multiply all over the place until they take up a good third of the growing area. This year, because of pregnancy and baby, I have been particularly neglectful, but despite that, and the efforts of some greedy local wood pigeons, there has been a bumper crop.

I put the first batch into roasted strawberry syrup and strawberry frozen yoghurt, following Jennie’s recipes. Then as another batch started to look neglected in the fridge, I knew the only way to hang onto their fragrance and flavour was jam.

Strawberry jam has a particularly tricky reputation. This is because strawberries contain very little pectin, the sticky substance that makes jams thicken, and so need lots of encouragement to set. It’s easy to end up with strawberry soup, which slides and drips off scones and toast. To combat this tendency, recipes typically include lemon juice, lots of sugar and added pectin, either from a bottle or using jam sugar.

I wanted a fresh tasting jam, without excessive boiling, and something I could do quickly (babies require you to shorten all tasks as much as possible). Many recipes ask you to macerate the fruit and sugar overnight, so they were out. I decided on Kim Boyce’s recipe in ‘Good to the Grain‘. This one is unusual in a few ways. First, it asks you to cook the sugar with water into a syrup before adding the fruit. My guess is that this allows you to cook the berries for a shorter time. It also contains much less sugar than other recipes: a cup for 3 lbs of fruit (or 230g sugar to 1.3kg fruit).

I liked the idea of this recipe, but was a bit scared that it would produce a soup, so I made the following changes:
– although I had only 900g (2lbs) fruit, I kept the sugar quantity the same
– I added the juice of half a lemon
– I then chopped the rest of the lemon half into slices and boiled it in water with the pips for 10 minutes. I then strained this into the pan with the berries.

This is a quick way to extract some pectin, and if you have more time, can be done more thoroughly, with the pieces squeezed through muslin (see marmalade post). This is loosely adapted from a June Taylor method, and a Christine Ferber recipe. As well as helping the set, I find adding lemon to strawberry jam really lifts the flavour, and prevents it from being cloying. (Felicity Cloake agrees).

[to see how effective this approach can be, when you have a lot of lemon pips, put them in a bowl and cover with cold water, and leave them to stand. The water will likely gel as the pectin coating the pips dissolves in the water.]

After boiling for 15-20 minutes, the mixture reduced down to a thick bright-red syrup, and after testing for a set, I took it off the heat. I then added a final lemon flourish by zesting the remaining lemon half straight into the jam before putting into jars.

This does not produce a remotely stiff jelly, and is a decidedly spoonable consistency that needs to be kept in the fridge. But the bright colour and flavour are enough to convince me to try this approach again when strawberries come around next year.

Recipe: Soft set strawberry jam

adapted from Kim Boyce ‘Good to the Grain’, an inspiring book of recipes for unconventional flours and grains

900g strawberries
240g sugar
A lemon

Wash and hull the strawberries. Cut most of them in half, leaving the tiny thumbnail sized ones whole, and cutting the big monsters into quarters. The berries will break down as they cook, so the pieces don’t need to be small.

Halve the lemon, juice one half and reserve, and slice the empty half into thin pieces. Put into a small saucepan with any pips, cover with cold water and boil for about 10 mins to extract the pectin.

Put a couple of saucers or small plates in the freezer to check the set later on.

Place the sugar into a large saucepan or preserving pan and add about 100ml water. This is the pan you will make the jam in, so it needs enough room to allow the jam to bubble up (minimum of 4 litre capacity). Put on a medium-high heat and bring to the boil to dissolve the sugar. Swirl the pan occasionally to ensure the sugar crystals all dissolve, and to make sure there are no hotspots where the sugar could start to caramelise.

Once the syrup is clear and bubbling, add the strawberries, lemon juice, and strain in the water from the lemon half, pressing down on the solids. If you have time, you can cool these pieces and put into muslin and squeeze it to extract even more pectin.

Bring everything to a rapid boil, turning the temperature down if it threatens to boil over. Stir occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom. The mixture should reduce down and thicken. When it seems thick, take out a spoonful onto one of the cold saucers or plates. Leave it in the fridge for a minute or two, and take the pan off the heat. When you push the side of the blob of jam with a finger, you should be able to see wrinkles on the surface, which indicate a set. Mine reached 102.5C with a thermometer when I took it off the heat (usually you look for 104C for jam to set, but as this has little sugar, and sets softly, it won’t get there).

With the jam off the heat, zest in the remaining lemon half and stir in. Allow the jam to settle and thicken a little in the pan before putting into clean, sterilised jam jars. As this has so little sugar, it should be kept in the fridge.

Candied peel – why it works

Feb14

Whenever I make marmalade, the huge piles of wasted peel get me down. While I like the taste of orange peel, i dont like my marmalade to be jam packed with it, so I tend to include only some of the peel in the preserve. But those shiny, bright orange skins disappearing into the food waste bin is such a sad sight. Its only the exhaustion induced by the particularly time consuming method of marmalade production that leads me to discard these skins. Because instead, I could be making candied peel – and this is what I did this time.

But what is it that turns orange peel into candied peel successfully? All the recipes say different things, even though it’s a very simple recipe. The idea is to remove some of the bitterness that makes orange peel unpleasant to eat raw, soften it so you can bite through easily, and then steep in sugar syrup to sweeten and preserve it, without causing the sugar to recrystallise.

The problem is that hardly any of the recipes explain why they have the steps they do. Not understanding what’s going on really annoys me. If I don’t know the purpose of each step, then it’s much harder for me to work out when each stage is done, or to spot if something has gone wrong.

And this is a baking-type recipe – it should be precise – but when all the recipes disagree slightly, how do you know which one to follow?

In the case of the candied peel, the basic steps are:
1. Remove the peel, either by scoring the entire peel, or by peeling just the zest with a peeler (if you do that, there generally isn’t a requirement to blanch it).
2. Blanch the peel – in anything from 1–5 changes of water. (Sometimes, boil the peel until tender) as well.
3. Immerse in sugar and water, anything from 1:1 ratio to 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. This might also include some corn syrup, or some cream of tartar. Boil for anything from 30 minutes to 2 hours.
4. Put out on a rack to drain. Roll in sugar straight away or leave out to dry for a day or several days.

That’s a lot of variation for very few steps of instruction. Obviously, you’re dealing with two big uncertainties: a natural product, the orange, that can be sweet or bitter, thick-skinned or thin skinned; there’s also another uncertainty that is acknowledged in recipes much less often: your individual palate. Relatively few recipe writers encourage you to taste as you go and then adjust suit what you would prefer. Do you quite like the bitter tang of orange peel or do you have a sweeter tooth? Are you planning to use this peel in recipes where the sour contrast is going to be appreciated, or would you like to eat these with chocolate where you want things a bit sweeter?

The first part, the blanching is there primarily to remove the bitterness from the pith – or at least moderate it. Harold McGee explains:

“The outer epidermis contains the aromatic oil glands while the spongy, pectin-rich
albedo usually contains protective bitter phenolic substances. Both the oil with its
terpenes and the antioxidant phenolics are valuable phytochemicals. The bitters are
water-soluble, while the oils are not. Cooks can therefore leach the peel repeatedly
with hot (rapid) or cold (slow) water to remove the bitter compounds, then gently
cook the peel if still necessary to soften the albedo, and finally infuse it with a
concentrated sugar syrup. Through all the processing, the water-insoluble oils stay
largely in the rind.” – from ‘On Food and Cooking’

So blanching the orange peel makes it edible by removing the bitter compounds and softening the pectin. This means you should be able to taste it, and test the softness, to determine how many times you want to blanch the peel.

When you infuse it with sugar syrup to preserve it, you are trying to reach a certain concentration of sugar, and this is most easily measured with the boiling temperature of the syrup. As you boil a sugar syrup, the temperature increases as the amount of water decreases, and the sugar gets more concentrated – this is essentially what a sugar thermometer is measuring. At a boiling point of 230 degrees F / 110C you get to about 80% concentration of sugar. This is a good level for candied fruit. If you stop at a lower level, there is a risk of crystallisation, as well as a risk that the peels will remain too sticky and not keep well. This also means that it doesn’t matter too much what ratio of sugar to water you start out with – except that a weaker solution will take longer to reach the right concentration, meaning that the peel will be submerged for longer, and this can help make sure that the syrup penetrates all the way through properly, especially with thick pieces of peel.

Traditional candying processes for whole fruits – for cherries, tangerines, melon in places like France – require the fruit to be cooked in increasingly concentrated syrups over many days. This allows the sugar to penetrate into the thick fruit and ensures that the water is displaced.

Adding cream of tartar (an acid) along with the sugar helps to prevent crystallisation of the sugar in the final peels. The acid helps encourage the sucrose in the granulated sugar to break down into glucose and fructose, its two smaller units. These get in the way of the sucrose reforming nice neat sugar crystals. Adding corn syrup does a similar job – it already has glucose and fructose in it, so they also help interfere with crystallisation.

The peel should cook for a good long time in the syrup – 45 minutes to 2 hours is the general guidance. Slow is good, to make sure the peel is well infused. Then remove the peel from the syrup and spread onto a cooling rack to dry a little, and become tacky rather than sticky to the touch. Then you can roll in sugar, or dip in chocolate, as you prefer.

Links:

June Taylor and Martha Stewart making candied Meyer lemon peel – recipe and video

Smitten Kitchen making orangettes

Candied ginger, candied lemon peels, and science

Seville orange marmalade

Jan20

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Feb24

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).

Greengage Jam

Aug28

A few weeks ago I transported a box full of greengage plums, plus my mother’s old preserving pan back from my parent’s house in the back of a mini. There was around 1kg of fruit that we had picked from the large tree in their garden. At home, you could always tell when the fruit was getting ripe by the soft ‘splat’ from the plums as they fell from the tree and onto the patio below, to be nibbled on by wasps and other insects. That was when the ladder would have to come out, to reach all those fruits that would inevitably be just beyond your fingertips, forcing you to tiptoe on the top of the ladder in a particularly precarious way.

I never sought these plums out when I was little (being somewhat fruit-averse as a child) but now, older and wiser, while I still don’t fancy eating them raw from the tree, I can appreciate their worth as cooking material. First thoughts would be as roast fruit, a crumble or a jam. Having roasted plums very successfully when they arrived in my organic box a month or so ago (using Gordon Ramsay’s recipe from ‘Just Desserts‘) I went for jam this time.

As so often when stuck for a recipe, I went to my Google customised search, which covers blogs as well as recipe sites like the BBC and Waitrose.com. There, I found a beautifully simple recipe on Orangette. This follows the simple principle of macerating the fruit with the sugar in advance (something that I believe is supposed to keep the fruit whole), and then boiled until a set is reached. This only made 2 jars of jam, but considering the small amount of fruit I had and the tastiness of the jam, that’s just fine with me.

Recipe

around 875g plums or greengages, to give 800g stoned fruit
400g granulated sugar
juice of 1/2 small lemon

Mix everything together in a non-metallic bowl and macerate for at least 2 hours, and up to 6.

Sterilise jam jars (I only needed 2) by washing them in hot water, or in the dishwasher, then placing on a tray in a 140C oven for 30 minutes.

Transfer the fruit & sugar mixture to a preserving pan or wide saucepan. Bring to to a boil and boil for 30 minutes. Skim the foam from the surface about 10 or 15 minutes in. Test the set briefly on a cold plate, then pot and seal.

As plums are high in pectin, you shouldn’t have any problem with the set – in fact, mine was quite firm, so I could probably have got away with a shorter boiling time.

Using Mainly Spoons

Reading between the lines of recipes

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