The basic idea for this came from our conversation with Darrell (see previous post). Unfortunately, his instructions focused mostly on how to prepare the citron for making marmalade, and not on how to make marmalade…so, we had to learn/guess at that part. Please let me know what we did wrong if you know something about making marmalade.
- cut 2 citrons lengthwise
- put them in cold water and bring to a boil
- throw out that water
- add cold water again and bring it to a boil
- throw out that water
- scoop the pulp and most of the white stuff out of the citrons
- julienne the citron peel
- for every pound of fruit, use 2.5 cups of sugar
At this point, Darrell just said “and make marmalade out of it”. He said this is how they make their orange marmalade (which we bought and tried…it’s very good). We’d never made marmalade before…so we found a recipe for “citrus marmalade without added pectin” on the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation and tried to use that. We mostly made educated guesses at the quantities of things to use, but this site was very helpful for learning the basics of how to sanitize and seal the jars.
Our “marmalade” is in jars now, but it doesn’t look like it’s jelled…I think we either used too much water (for the record, we had almost a pound of peel and we used 2 cups of water) or not enough of the white stuff (where most of the pectin lives). It made almost 3 half-pint jars. We’re taking off for Michigan in the morning, and bringing a jar to my mom–I’ll report back on how it tastes next week.