D-I-Y Marmalade

Try asking for "Marmalade Oranges".

They aren't available until January/February, usually towards the end of January for a couple of weeks. Usually Sainsburys, Tesco, etc. do have them but often the staff don't seem to know.

A bit early for them: if memory serves not usually in stores until New Year.

Wait until mid-January or so, then you'll see them in Tesco and the like. Also if you have a Farm Shop near you, ask in there whether they get them in.

They're only available for a short period in Jan, so keep yer eyes open They won't be there now.

SWMBO does it here and gets about a dozen of them. Add in a few lemons and that makes about 14 450gm jars.

They used to be around in "Bob a Job" week. My mother had the scouts cutting up oranges

Complete ignorance here, but can't you make marmalade from a mixture of citrus fruits, lemon-lime-orange, or grapefruit-lemon-orange, for example? Unless you like only-orange marmalade, of course.

Of course. Its a partly caramelised jam that includes peel.

I stayed on a fruit farm in Southern Spain. It simply wasn't worth their while to pick the oranges and send them to market.

Mind you, they made money as a veggy guest house, so they didn't need to sully their hands picking fruit.

I have recently got into making lime marmalade. I never have liked cooked orange, so this is my alternative. The commercial lime marmalade (here's looking at you, Roses) is so thin and watery it isn't worth buying. Mine is so simple, and I can use what might technically be too little sugar for long term preserving. Turns out very intense, and still has sharpness.

My tip : Use a pressure cooker (preferably one of the new-fangled electric ones for ease), put a little water in the bottom, put halved fruit on a trivet, cook for maybe half an hour on high pressure. Let cool completely. The peel is then so easy to slice. Seeds easy to remove. Then boil up, add a touch of bicarb if you wish, sugar and boil to setting point.

Seville oranges are only harvested once a year and, from memory, it is too early. Don't we get them after Christmas? Followed by blood oranges at end of January through February.

Frozen Seville oranges and tinned pulp are available.

Now that is a bloody good idea. I love limes and all sorts of marmalade, I'm very keen on my little electric pressure cooker, but I never thought of that use.

Do you have a target temperature for setting point, or do you do it the old fashioned way with a plate?

(I have more thermometers in my kitchen than anyone else I know; a non contact, a digital with various probes, thermocouples in both ovens going to an external two channel display, and a thermocouple going to a proper industrial temperature controller that I use in an old-fashioned slow cooker for sous vide).

Apparently, this stuff works 'just as well'.

I too have a probe thermometer but I haven't used it for my marmalade! I just look, stir, and when it gets to what I think is a gelling stage, bottle it. Small batches, and only for me, mean it isn't that much of an issue if it doesn't set as well as possible. But it always sets adequately.

I find it best to do the boiling with sugar in a normal pan/jam pan. While that is heating up, I sterilise some jars in the electric pressure cooker.

Sfunny, I'm partial to lime marmalade (and typically got Roses) and have a half used jar atm and I can't say it's watery?

Take some out with a knife to spread on yer toast and the rest just stays there where you cut it?

(Now I've got to use those last two small bits of homemade wholegrain toasted with lime marmalade on!). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

You'll need lots of sugar too, with the seville oranges, which are bitter. But then you get the marmalade taste.

If you stay in a hotel in France, they'll give you jam-made-with-oranges for your croissant, and that's what it tastes like. You want marmalade taste, you better use seville oranges.

Yes. Ma Made. Which my Ma Made when she was alive. I don't know the economics - might be considered cheating.

It is the taste rather than the consistency that is watery. Perhaps a figure of speech?

Thin cut - seriously?

:-)

Yes indeed, the old knowledge was lost. My old grannie used to get them from a local greengrocer baack in the 1960s. Shop Marmalade is not a patch on home made, too much sugar and less taste. It was and probably still is hard to get blood oranges as well as I used to like the juice from those. Brian