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[food] marmalmade!
Three kilos of orange converted into... many... jars of marmalade, plus all the clean-up. There is... a risk... that I will wind up making another 2 kg worth towards the end of the season; we shall see. (A is contemplating ordering another kilo of blood oranges toward the end of the season, when they'll be generally redder, and if so I'm going to experiment with adding the cardamom at a later stage in proceedings; despite the drawbacks of Insufficient Jars and also I Haven't Finished 2019's Marmalade I'm very much going "but what if I made a batch of bergamot-and-rosemary...?")
I have not built a decorative castle and taken photos because I've been tidying them away as they come, and am loath to extricate our lot from their pantry shelf again. I have, however, spent a fair bit of the past 24 hours having a peevish autism about what exactly all the recipes mean when they say "scrape out the pith": I had a horrible moment halfway through patiently separating zest and pith for batch #3 yesterday of "hold on... when they say... remove the pith... do they not ACTUALLY mean that I should... remove... the pith...?" (This is A Thing. When recipe say "over low heat" it turns out they usually want it less low than that; when they say "mix together as quickly and with as little handling as possible" they still mean not that little. I peeve.)
I have come to the conclusion that there is hideous inconsistency in what people mean. Some very clearly say "no, really, remove all of the spongey white pith from the bright-coloured zest", and some of them advocate leaving... some... amount.... of it attached to the zest! And so I have decided to merrily sunk-cost-fallacy my way to the dubious conclusion of, well, I've got good at actually separating the zest from all of the pith, and I would hate to think that the time I've spent on it so far could have been avoided, and clearly people like what I'm doing, so I'm going to blithely continue along as I have been. Probably.
Ingredients: 1 kg orange, 1 lemon, 2 l water, 2 kg sugar.
Optional extras: alcohol. cardamom. rosemary. bergamot! or other citrus.
Method: put 2 l of water in the maslin pan; get one of the small Pyrex out and drape the muslin inelegantly across it.
Count the citrus. (You will be grateful to know what proportion you've got through later; do not do more than 1 kg at a time, because then you won't be able to cook it aggressively enough without it boiling over.) Cut the citrus in half using a chef's knife, pile them (in their pairs) on a big plate, and take them over to the corner with the mini Kenwood. Juice, stacking each pair of shells together again.
Take the plate back over to the chopping board. Also take the mini Kenwood jug.
Juice goes in the pan with the water (this will probably be around 2,5 l). Pips/flesh/etc get nestled into the muslin. Once the colander-bit is more-or-less empty, dunk it briefly into the pan to rinse it. (Yay pectin.)
Now put on your ring splints. Cut each of the halves into half again using a chef's knife. "Scrape" (...) the pith from the zest using a paring knife. Do not use the knuckle of your little finger as a pivot -- keep your hand in the air! Discard the pith from the lemon; dump all of the rest into the waiting muslin. Stack up the peels neatly as you go. Sharpen the paring knife every other fruit or so.
Once they are all done: take a stack of peels, slice them up, dump them in the pan. Once the peel's all done, tie up the muslin bag and stick that in the pan too. Getting to this point will take around 2½ hours.
Turn on the heat and go do something else for 90 minutes to 2 hours, wandering by to check periodically. The liquid level wants to be reduced, the bag of pith and pips not withstanding, by about half. If you overshoot it's fine, you can just add some more water. Once it's cool enough to handle, hoick out the bag and squish all the tasty pectin out of it.
If you started mid-afternoon, at this point you probably want to cover the pan with a tea towel and call it a night, but unless the citrus peel is still actively chewy you can also just keep going.
Add the sugar. Heat gently until it's dissolved. Heat up to max; once it comes to a rolling boil, note the time: it wants 15 minutes. Only turn the heat down if necessary to stop the pan boiling over. (Hold your nerve!)
After 15 minutes, do a cold plate test. It will probably be ready; you just want it to wrinkle at all and not separate out into a gooey layer and a runny layer.
Once it's set, remove from heat and leave to settle for 15 minutes (this theoretically winds up with the peel more evenly distributed, and less prone to Just floating to the top). After 5 minutes, add any non-citrus optional extras and stir through briefly. (I haven't actually tried adding cardamom at this stage yet, but that's the plan for the next batch, rather than dumping it in pre-boiling...)
While it's settling (and cooling a little, though apparently Not Below 85 °C), wash the jars with hot soapy water, rinse out, etc. You will need 7-8 of them; this time around I got 6 x 340g jars plus one Large Jar out of each batch.)
Lay some bits of kitchen towel out next to the hob and line the jars up on it. Decant. Wipe the rims; put lids on; rinse out the maslin pan with washing up water.
Place the filled jars into the pan, padded with tea towels -- they should all fit. Cover with water. Bring to the boil, and boil merrily for 10 minutes. Extricate onto a cooling rack. Try not to jump every time a lid goes ping.
Once they're cool, label and tidy away. Future-you says thank you. <3
I have not built a decorative castle and taken photos because I've been tidying them away as they come, and am loath to extricate our lot from their pantry shelf again. I have, however, spent a fair bit of the past 24 hours having a peevish autism about what exactly all the recipes mean when they say "scrape out the pith": I had a horrible moment halfway through patiently separating zest and pith for batch #3 yesterday of "hold on... when they say... remove the pith... do they not ACTUALLY mean that I should... remove... the pith...?" (This is A Thing. When recipe say "over low heat" it turns out they usually want it less low than that; when they say "mix together as quickly and with as little handling as possible" they still mean not that little. I peeve.)
I have come to the conclusion that there is hideous inconsistency in what people mean. Some very clearly say "no, really, remove all of the spongey white pith from the bright-coloured zest", and some of them advocate leaving... some... amount.... of it attached to the zest! And so I have decided to merrily sunk-cost-fallacy my way to the dubious conclusion of, well, I've got good at actually separating the zest from all of the pith, and I would hate to think that the time I've spent on it so far could have been avoided, and clearly people like what I'm doing, so I'm going to blithely continue along as I have been. Probably.
Ingredients: 1 kg orange, 1 lemon, 2 l water, 2 kg sugar.
Optional extras: alcohol. cardamom. rosemary. bergamot! or other citrus.
Method: put 2 l of water in the maslin pan; get one of the small Pyrex out and drape the muslin inelegantly across it.
Count the citrus. (You will be grateful to know what proportion you've got through later; do not do more than 1 kg at a time, because then you won't be able to cook it aggressively enough without it boiling over.) Cut the citrus in half using a chef's knife, pile them (in their pairs) on a big plate, and take them over to the corner with the mini Kenwood. Juice, stacking each pair of shells together again.
Take the plate back over to the chopping board. Also take the mini Kenwood jug.
Juice goes in the pan with the water (this will probably be around 2,5 l). Pips/flesh/etc get nestled into the muslin. Once the colander-bit is more-or-less empty, dunk it briefly into the pan to rinse it. (Yay pectin.)
Now put on your ring splints. Cut each of the halves into half again using a chef's knife. "Scrape" (...) the pith from the zest using a paring knife. Do not use the knuckle of your little finger as a pivot -- keep your hand in the air! Discard the pith from the lemon; dump all of the rest into the waiting muslin. Stack up the peels neatly as you go. Sharpen the paring knife every other fruit or so.
Once they are all done: take a stack of peels, slice them up, dump them in the pan. Once the peel's all done, tie up the muslin bag and stick that in the pan too. Getting to this point will take around 2½ hours.
Turn on the heat and go do something else for 90 minutes to 2 hours, wandering by to check periodically. The liquid level wants to be reduced, the bag of pith and pips not withstanding, by about half. If you overshoot it's fine, you can just add some more water. Once it's cool enough to handle, hoick out the bag and squish all the tasty pectin out of it.
If you started mid-afternoon, at this point you probably want to cover the pan with a tea towel and call it a night, but unless the citrus peel is still actively chewy you can also just keep going.
Add the sugar. Heat gently until it's dissolved. Heat up to max; once it comes to a rolling boil, note the time: it wants 15 minutes. Only turn the heat down if necessary to stop the pan boiling over. (Hold your nerve!)
After 15 minutes, do a cold plate test. It will probably be ready; you just want it to wrinkle at all and not separate out into a gooey layer and a runny layer.
Once it's set, remove from heat and leave to settle for 15 minutes (this theoretically winds up with the peel more evenly distributed, and less prone to Just floating to the top). After 5 minutes, add any non-citrus optional extras and stir through briefly. (I haven't actually tried adding cardamom at this stage yet, but that's the plan for the next batch, rather than dumping it in pre-boiling...)
While it's settling (and cooling a little, though apparently Not Below 85 °C), wash the jars with hot soapy water, rinse out, etc. You will need 7-8 of them; this time around I got 6 x 340g jars plus one Large Jar out of each batch.)
Lay some bits of kitchen towel out next to the hob and line the jars up on it. Decant. Wipe the rims; put lids on; rinse out the maslin pan with washing up water.
Place the filled jars into the pan, padded with tea towels -- they should all fit. Cover with water. Bring to the boil, and boil merrily for 10 minutes. Extricate onto a cooling rack. Try not to jump every time a lid goes ping.
Once they're cool, label and tidy away. Future-you says thank you. <3