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.

We got this recipe from Darrell Corti.

* cut citrons in half lengthwise and place in a stainless steel pot.
* cover with cold water and bring to a boil
* once boiling, throw out that water and cover with cold water
* bring to a boil, then take fruit and scoop out inside.
* measure the exercise/>lose-weight-exercise/>weight of the fruit
* for every pound of fruit, take 1 cup suger and 1 cup water and bring to a boil
* put citron in and bring it to a boil
* turn it off and let sit and cool down, leave overnight
* next day, bring to a boil. Afterward, use a thin knife to check tenderness. It should go in easily but not be mushy.
* put fruit upsidedown on a cake rack covered in wax paper and leave it to drip all night. Mine took much longer than one night to dry out.
* cut into smaller pieces
* put sugar and fruit pieces in a plastic bag and shake until covered
* store in a container with dry paper towel to dry out completely.

I made two batches using this recipe. The first batch was small (3 citrons), the 2nd was large (maybe 8 citrons in my huge 5 gallon pot). In both cases, I ended up with some very tasty stuff, but it wasn’t fully cooked or candied. I had a hard time getting the 1 cup of syrup per pound of citron to fully cover the citron. I ended up cutting the citrons into quarters at that point, which did help some, but there were still parts sticking out of the syrup and so I stirred frequently while bringing that to a boil.

I also had a hard time getting the candy to dry. I finally ended up spreading it out on a rack and pointing a portable heater at it for a couple days. It’s still not fully dry, but it’s also not fully candied, so it’s not going to last too long anyway.

Lessons learned: use a tall, narrow pot and figure out a better way to dry the candy.

A huge thanks to Linnea for following Darrell around and transcribing his knowledge and wisdom and for helping with the whole process.

Margaret and I took a jar of the candy to Darrell Corti last week. He said it was “not cooked enough”, but that it was “very good”. We ended up talking to him about citron, wine, and Rome for a while longer. I’ll post more recipes from that encounter soon.