Well, oranges are in season folks! Yes….they do come from outside our “local” diameter, but sometimes we have to love our distant neighbors too! My husband and I wanted to experiment after hearing my mom, who is in Florida, talk about her experiences with making marmalade. We purchased five blood oranges, two lemons and four pounds of sugar.
boiling oranges
We looked at a lot of recipes, on-line and in several of my canning books, and realized there is more than one way to get to this tasty treat. What they all seemed to have in common was equal parts of water to sugar ratios. After that……you could boil the fruit first, use or don’t use, lemons, slice the rind with the orange, peel the rind and slice, use the pith (the white fleshy part) or not, boil the pips (seeds) with the pith and remove, or not, let the rinds set in water overnight, or not…..I think you get the point! We settled on a recipe from Putting Food By, as they are often a go-to source.
It called for:
2 ½ pounds whole sour oranges
2 lemons
8 cups of sugar
8 cups of water
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in the water
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making it work!
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making it work!
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hot, hot, hot!
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fun with funnels
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before the boil
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boiling marmalade
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slicing quartered orange
…..and despite my misgivings with the water and sugar…..I did follow the recipe……this time. We boiled our fruit, as the logic behind this seemed to be the rind would not be as tough in the final product. (We also took out some of the fruit from the rind and pith and sliced it by itself. I don’t really think this made any difference in our final product but I wanted to get a feel for both methods) As everything went in the pot to boil, I realized that my equipment was in storage 120 miles away!!
So….we improvised. I have told some of my students that you can tie jar rings together to keep your jars off of the bottom of the canner, but I only had enough jars to process what we were making. My wire rack was too big to go in the bottom of the pan I was using to water bath so, on the advice of a favorite food network celeb, Alton Brown, I used a couple of large, clean, kitchen cloths to perform this trick! Those who can, are an adaptable bunch!!
- in the water
So, what did we learn from the experience, other than the fact that my husband still does not like marmalade. I prefer the rinds to be sliced as opposed to the bits that the food processor my mom used produced. This is more of an asthetic preference as I liked the lemonless flavor of hers better. I don’t like the ratio of two lemons with the oranges. For five oranges, I think that one lemon, if any, would be good enough for blood oranges which are sour enough on their own. I don’t know if a sweeter orange would be different. I would also use less water and less sugar, maybe six of each, (four if I could get away with it) and see if this could cut down on the time it took to bring the mixture to a gel stage (about 223 F). , as it took way too long to gel. Maybe breaking it down into two pans would be better. All in all, it was a lot of fun, really easy and can be done in 3ish hours.
Looking forward to the next batch!
Canning is no longer a concept practiced only in the country. Chicagoans are realizing that the best pantry gets stocked with the freshest summer produce and people all over the city are learning how to “put food up.”
