marmalade

after a year of preserves projects, my lady friend got me a great jamming book for christmas- the blue chair jam cookbook by rachel saunders. all the recipes are very thorough and seem to stem from a desire for very consistent and delicious results. so, for our first test drive, we bastardized her delicately crafted page mandarin marmalade recipe and made it with blood oranges instead.

according to ms. saunders (and i thoroughly misquote and make things up here), you have to sneak up on citrus fruits, lull them into a false sense of security and then trick them into being marmalade in a process that takes three days. after an overnight soak in water, the fruit is cooked down...

you can't tell, but there are two pots going here. this one has quartered fruit that will be strained out on day three, the other has the pretty little slices of fruit that will be part of the finished product.

on day three the reserved syrup from one pot is combined with the slices from the other, a bunch of (in this case) lemon juice and a whole lot of sugar. then it is back to the stove...

but only to get the marmalade up to the temperature needed for the jelly to set.

we had extra assistants for this project who kept us on top of the set testing process which involved frozen spoons...

 

this is how you know it's done.

we ended up with around 10 jars of product (half for our wonderful assistants) and, since there were some extra fruit, a new jar of preserved lemons...

now, to be honest, i don't love marmalade. the bitterness doesn't really do it for me. but, that being said, this stuff is pretty dang good.