Bright citrus, dark days: the joy of homemade marmalade
January can feel like the darkest month of the year, but one thing is guaranteed to brighten up this challenging time: making homemade marmalade.
It starts with spotting Seville oranges in the greengrocer’s shop. I always see them as a challenge. Will I buy them? Or will I skip making marmalade this year? I rarely resist.
Seville oranges: impossible to ignore
This year, I was encouraged on my marmalade mission when I overheard an elderly gentleman talking about Seville oranges. He was back to buy supplies for his third batch. There’s dedication.
The lady behind the till asked: “Did you know you can buy marmalade in the supermarket?”
Of course we do. But that’s irrelevant. For me, making marmalade is about continuing a tradition, a ritual that spans an entire weekend, filling the house with the delicious sharp/sweet aroma of Seville oranges, and ending with winter sunshine in a jar.
It’s a wonderful counterpoint to everything that’s instantaneous today. It gives me something to focus on, slowly, as well as a huge sense of satisfaction.
Seville marmalade oranges are lighter, knobblier and more bitter than normal oranges
Step one: time travel back to last summer
A word of warning about jars. You need to plan ahead. Ideally, you will skip off to your local kitchen shop in July and stock up on Kilner jars. True, you might have some competition from ardent jam and chutney makers, but not as much as if you leave it until January. If you wait until the start of the year, the only sizes left will be ‘teaspoon’ and ‘lake’.
Then you’ll have to do what everyone else does and cobble together a motley selection of jars from the back of your cupboards.
My marmalade recipe
Here are the ingredients for my marmalade recipe:
- Ikg of Seville oranges
- I large lemon
- 2.5 litres of water
- 2kg of white granulated sugar (more on that later)
Start by finding your Seville oranges. Take five or six and you should have a kilo. Part of the joy of making marmalade is that these special oranges are only available in January. Miss them and you’ve got to wait a year for them to come round again.
They are strangely light compared to normal oranges, with extremely rough, bobbly skin and are far too bitter to eat au naturel. (Don’t try.) Choose oranges with as few blemishes as possible, for these will become your shreds.
Don’t get carried away and buy three kilos of Seville oranges instead of one. Managing three boiling pans of marmalade at once is like having a kitchen full of hungry tigers.
Oranges with the pith and pips removed, ready to be finely sliced
Day one of marmalade making
Some people power through their marmalade making, cramming the entire process into a single day. I think that’s a little unseemly. It’s much more pleasurable to spread the activity over two days.
The peel of six oranges and a lemon, transmuted into shreds
Here’s what to do on day one:
- Remove the buttons from the top of the fruit.
- Scrub the oranges and lemon.
- Cut all the fruit in half.
- Squeeze the orange juice into a jug and put to one side.
- Squeeze the lemon juice into another jug and put it in the fridge.
- Put a muslin cloth (as sold by companies like Kilner) into a bowl, with the edges of the cloth hanging over the side.
- Remove the pith and pips from the fruit using a dessert spoon and put it into the muslin.
- Use a sharp knife to cut the peel into shreds. I like a chunky cut, although some people like a thin or medium cut. Each to their own.
- Put your sliced peel into a big pan together with the orange juice and 2.5 litres of water.
- Tie up the pith and pips in their muslin cloth and anchor the cloth to the side of the pan with string. Make sure the muslin bag is immersed in the peel / water / orange juice mixture. Something ineffable is going on in there to do with pectin emanating from the pith and pips, and we don’t want to interfere with that.
- Leave to soak overnight. Give yourself a reward for completing day one.
Soak the cut peel in the orange juice and water overnight. Tie the muslin bag of pith and pips to the side of the pan.
Day two of marmalade making
This is when things get serious. Before you begin:
- Find enough jam jars (you need about one per orange), remove old labels and wash the jars.
- Assemble essential kit such as your jam thermometer and metal funnel.
- Find a small stack of china saucers / small plates that will survive going in the freezer.
Fill your house with the aroma of orange
Bring your pan of peel, orange juice and water up to the boil, then simmer very gently for about an hour and a half (maybe a bit longer).
After an hour and a quarter, put a few saucers / plates in your freezer, so they have time to chill. This is in preparation for testing the set of your marmalade later.
Remove a bit of peel from the pan, let it cool, and test whether it’s cooked by seeing if you can squish it between your fingers.
By now, the liquid level in your pan should have dropped by about a third.
Next:
- Remove the muslin bag of pips and pith and put it on a plate to cool. (However long you leave it, it will remain as hot as Venus at high noon. This is another mystery of the pith and pip bag that we aren’t yet evolved enough to understand.)
- Add the lemon juice.
- Pour the sugar into the pan and stir it in until it’s dissolved.
Do not be tempted by muscovado
Do not attempt to use anything other than white granulated sugar. Don’t buy special sugar with extra pectin. You will insult the jam gods and their revenge will be swift and terrible.
Above all, do not add muscovado sugar. Last year, my first batch of marmalade went pips up because I misunderstood a recommendation and used 100% muscovado sugar instead of white granulated.
It produced terrifying volcanoes of boiling sticky liquid which stuck to the bottom of the pan and clung to walls, teatowels and my hair. The result was a noxious farmyard gloop with a bitter citrus undertone. It was quite hard work to spoon it into the food recycling bin. I was tempted to give up, but refused to be defeated by two kilos of The Wrong Sugar. I took a deep breath, headed out to the greengrocer’s, bought some more oranges and started again.
The rolling boil: keep your nerve
Make sure no one rings your phone or doorbell for the next half hour. You have to pay attention now.
Hook the jam thermometer onto the side of the pan and whack the heat up to full. Squeeze the muslin bag over the pan so the pectin-filled jelly oozes out. You will need asbestos hands or rubber gloves to do this. Be careful not to squeeze too hard or some of the boiling jelly will squirt out sideways. (This will not add joy to your day.)
Stir the pectin into the mixture and watch the dial on the thermometer rise. According to experts, the setting point for marmalade is 104.5°C. It will be tricky to spot precisely when the dial reaches that number because your kitchen will be full of orange clouds and steam. But, with luck, your thermometer will have a ‘Jam’ arrow that will be just about visible. It should take around 15 minutes.
In the meantime, put your oven on at 140C/120C Fan/Gas 1.
The set point for the marmalade is 104.5°C. When the arrow on the thermometer points to ‘Jam’, you’re there.
The science bit
I looked this up, because it bothered me. Why does the marmalade have to reach 104.5°C and what’s the deal with the relationship between the heat and amount of liquid in the pan?
I discovered that marmalade will only set when the concentration of sugar is high enough – around 60-65%. As the water evaporates, the sugar becomes more concentrated. So when your thermometer hits 104.5°C, it’s telling you that enough water has evaporated and you’ve now got the right sugar-to-water ratio.
Translation: keep that pan on a rolling boil until you reach the set point.
Messing about with saucers
Your marmalade making now moves to the ‘messing about with saucers’ stage. This is where you:
- Remove the pan from the heat.
- Drop a blob of marmalade onto a chilled saucer and put it in the fridge for a couple of minutes.
- Push the mixture with your finger to see if it has a crinkly skin and is set.
If it’s set, hurrah! If not, return the pan to the heat and cook the mixture for another 5 minutes and try again.
If there’s scum on top of your marmalade, skim it off. You can also stir in a teaspoon of butter, which should dissolve it.
A batch of marmalade that went well (not this year’s)
Sterilise jars and watch for 90°C
Things should be calmer now, but you still don’t want anyone to distract you. You have a short window to prepare your jam jars while you wait for the marmalade to cool.
The marmalade needs to be cooler than 104.5°C before you put into jars, but hotter than 85°C (below 85°C it won’t be sterile). If you put the marmalade into jars when it’s too hot, the shreds will sink to the bottom and you will be sad. I like to wait until the thermometer reads 90°C.
So you have about 20 minutes to sterilise your jam jars. You’ve already preheated your oven and washed the jars. Remove any rubber seals. Now swish a bit of hot water around the jars and put them on a baking sheet in the oven for 20 minutes. Sterilise the rubber seals by boiling them in a pan of water for 3 minutes.
Pot up your marmalade
Once your thermometer shows 90°C, you can start funnelling the marmalade into the jars. When you’ve done that, arrange them in an attractive pyramid and feel extremely pleased with yourself. You have made something special at a gloomy time of year. You have appeased the jam gods. You can backlight your marmalade and show it off on Instagram. You have started the year well.*
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*Unless, like me, some of the peel got burnt on the bottom of the pan. In that case, you can still show off your marmalade on Insta, but might have to rebrand it as “cinder orange” flavour.