What makes a good marmalade

Delia says this may take as little as 15 minutes, but I have to wait almost twice that my own fault, presumably. The result; a vibrant orange preserve with a firm set and a nice sharp flavour. Good old Delia. Jane Grigson informs me that whole oranges make the "simplest, quickest and best-flavoured marmalades" — she gives two recipes, but it's difficult to prop my paperback copy of English Food open with hands sticky with juice, so I use the one from Darina Allen's Ballymaloe Cookery Course instead.

Tipping a kilogram of oranges into a pan of water and leaving them to soften for a couple of hours feels wonderfully liberating, until I realise that I still have to chop the peel, this time in a baking dish to catch the copious juice. The pips go into a muslin bag, as before, and are returned to the pan along with the shredded peel, juice and sugar, which I've warmed in the oven to help it dissolve more quickly.

This marmalade takes a lot longer to get to the setting point — Darina says C is ideal, but this is a matter of debate: Marguerite Patten reckons that marmalade sets between and Unless my thermometer is faulty, however, I can confirm this isn't true. I end up with a tawny amber jelly, with a more complex bittersweet flavour than Delia's marmalade, although the set is less firm.

Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton's book Preserved hasn't let me down yet — their fruits of the forest rum, in particular, makes an excellent Christmas gift. Nick's marmalade recipe is somewhat unorthodox though; the first instruction is to zest the oranges, and then put the peel aside while you make the marmalade itself, which gives it no chance to soften.

While it's in the fridge, I squeeze the orange juice into a pan, along with the shells and pips no fancy muslin here — this is a very manly recipe and some lemon juice, cover them with extra orange juice and water, and then simmer it all for an hour. So far, so easy — but the marmalade must then cool for 24 hours before being gently boiled for another couple, then strained and … oh, the solids put into muslin for squeezing.

By this point I'm ruing leaving this one until last. The sugar goes into the pan along with the strained juice and the peel I so blithely zested a couple of days ago, when I thought this recipe was going to be a breeze, and it's then boiled until it reaches the setting point, which they reckon is C. Thankfully it reaches this very quickly, and the resulting marmalade has a good flavour, but the peel is chewy unsurprisingly, given it hasn't been softened , and the set rather stern for my tastes.

Delia reckons that preserving sugar, which has larger, more easily soluble crystals, is a waste of money, and I'm inclined to agree with her — as long as you stir the mixture vigorously after adding granulated sugar, there should be no problem with graininess. Warming the sugar, as both she and Darina Allen suggest, to help it dissolve more quickly, is also unnecessary; as well as being a waste of power, it's hard work trying to tip a couple of kilos of the stuff from a hot baking tray into a bubbling pan.

Bee Wilson says that brown sugar is a must for marmalade; according to Tamsin Day-Lewis, the refined stuff leaves a "toxic froth on the surface" — although if it does, I can't see it. Her recipe, which uses 1kg light muscovado sugar to g unrefined white granulated sugar, gives a strongly caramelised flavour to the finished preserve.

It's nice, but a bit treacley for my taste, so I decide to alter the proportions to half and half instead. Marmalade is part of the great British tradition of tolerance — you can pop in just about any flavour that takes your fancy. I cannot stand recipes that suggest that I cook my jam to the "desired consistency" or until it "passes the wrinkle plate test".

Say what? How do you know when marmalade is cooked enough? Let's be honest. If you are not a jam and marmalade expert and if you don't make preserves very often, you will probably lack the experience to see the visual cues of the perfect set. I know that I can't always tell! I hate guessing games and, as you know, I love to measure everything.

And that is how the marmalade temperature experiment was born. Once you understand the marmalade setting point , your jam-making will get a lot easier!

You have three basic options for determining if your marmalade has cooked enough and will set properly after cooling:. In general, once you achieve the right consistency according to your tests and then you have canned your marmalade in jars using a water bath method , you must set the sealed jars aside to cool and it will take 24 to 48 hours for the marmalade to thicken and achieve the final set.

I cooked up a batch of three fruit marmalade , using the whole fruit method no pectin. I measured the temperature as the marmalade bubbled away with an instant read thermometer, the Thermapen which is very fast at registering temperatures and temperature changes, but a probe thermometer with a longer cable like the Thermoworks Dot would be better because then you don't have to hold it with your hands, which would be much less dangerous to use than my hand-held setup.

I chose this range because most of the recipes I perused recommended cooking to somewhere in that range. As the marmalade boiled and I sampled away, I honestly thought my experiment was a flop. I could not have been more mistaken. Behold, the results! That's entirely up to you. Here's the impact of cooking temperature on marmalade set:.

Seville oranges have the most pectin, so a batch of Seville orange marmalade definitely does not require the addition of pectin. But that being said, citrus fruit vary as does their pectin content. As we can see above with my temperature experiment, the marmalade set has a lot to do with the concentration of sugar and the removal of water, and not as much to do with the pectin content. If we compare a dollop of pectin-set orange marmalade from the store to homemade marmalade with no extra pectin added, you will notice the pectin-set marmalade is more jellied, seemingly dryer.

The store-bought marmalade with pectin definitely doesn't have my favourite texture. It smears funnily on toast, and I found the jiggle of the pectin-set marmalade unpleasant, and a little odd. After your batch of marmalade is canned and left for 2 days to cool and achieve its final set, if you open your first jar and find that the marmalade is runny, it means that you didn't cook the marmalade for long enough or to a high enough temperature.

Your batch of marmalade contains too much water still. On the other hand, if you've overcooked a batch of marmalade, there's not much you can do. Overcooked marmalade has a few characteristics: chewy, tough citrus peel, possibly rubbery and a thick texture verging on dry.

I have been guilty of overcooking marmalade when I was trying to determine the set with a plate test: I left the pot of marmalade on the stove, which continued to boil while I was fiddling with the plate test. In those few minutes, the temperature of the marmalade continued to rise, and I ended up with a rubbery marmalade.

Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do to salvage a batch of overcooked marmalade. Of course, you can still eat overcooked marmalade and learn from this mistake. Remember to pull the pan off the heat while you determine if you've achieved the proper set and use an instant-read probe thermometer like this probe thermometer with a longer cable: the Thermoworks Dot to make sure you are able to measure changes in temperature as they happen with little delay!

When making marmalade, each step serves a purpose and though it might seem tedious, it's important to follow the steps carefully. For example, when you mix the chopped fruit with the sugar, it's very important to stir the mixture on a lower heat setting in order to properly dissolve all the sugar. The goal is to completely dissolve and melt the sugar. If you don't take time to properly dissolve the sugar at the very beginning of jam-making in general, you risk ending up with gritty crystallized marmalade because sugar wants to crystallize and just a tiny amount of undissolved sugar at this stage can ruin an entire batch of marmalade.

If you didn't properly dissolve the sugar, it's likely that you will notice sugar crystallizing in all the sealed jars of the entire batch of marmalade, before they've been opened. When you open a new jar, you can transfer the contents to a saucepan and heat it on low to warm the marmalade and melt the sugar crystals. Then transfer it back to the jar and store in the fridge. Some people also suggest briefly microwaving the open jar of marmalade to warm and melt the crystallized sugar.

It's important to properly close open jars of marmalade to avoid evaporation. If you don't close a jar of marmalade or jam properly, the surface may evaporate causing crystallization of the sugar. This isn't surprising given how much sugar you use to make preserves. This concentrated sugary spread is likely to crystallize over time, especially if it dries out.

It's honestly a matter of personal preference, but now I hope that you can better understand your options and pick your favourite marmalade set. I don't think there's a right or a wrong. I love them all. I love the flavour of the marmalade in this range, and I am happy that it will stay put on my toast.

In a perfect world, I would have a jar from each temperature on hand, at all times, to suit my mood. Please note this post contains affiliate links to Amazon.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. If you buy a product I recommend, I will get a small commission, and the price you have to pay will not change in any way. I have ideas of packagings in mind I've already told you, but I Iooove it when you're "Walter White-ing" pastry It's sort of like Tastespotting, but specific to the niche.

I'd love for you to submit this to the site. Good stuff! I found that my peel always burns at this stage even when only left for 5mins. I use all my peel so it is very chunky sliced quite thin. Still tastes good!!!! Will try stirring the next lot l make to see if it works, alsoread some where after softening peel removing it until after setting point feached then adding the peel so l will also try this to see which tastes the best.

Thanks for your comment! Adding the peel at the end would be another interesting method to test! And please, if you have a chance to stop by and let me know the results, or by email, I would love to hear back! I have tried adding the peel towards the end it it works great. You can get a firm set without overcoming g the peel. Christine Ferber does this with some of her recipes. Cook the usurp to set point and throw the fruit back in.

Stirring the marmalade when it has started to boil is a good way of making sure that you have reached rolling boil. If stirring stops the boil then you have not quite reached boiling. It is when you cannot stir it off the boil that you have reached rolling boil. Janice, I'm not going to be keeping my marmalade in January tradition this year -- can't squeeze in one more thing -- but next year I'm going to try stopping at degrees.

That looks good to me. I usually make mine too thick. Good to know! I flew to Oakland and took a class from June Taylor and it is so true that the temperature is everything. I also learned to make my own pectin from the guts and leftover stuff. The advice on jam and marmalade is really good. I love the esperimental-scientific approach. Maybe pectin is overrated but temperature is underestimated as setting factors.

The fact that boiling temperature rises as you cook along is due to the water evaporating. Do you think it is possible to shorten the time needed to obtain a proper temperature could be decreased by adding more sugar from the beginning and start the boiling with a higher sugar concentration?

Thank you for your comments! I hope this post will help many when they are making marmalade. I have struggled with the plate test for years, and I always wondered about the temperature so that's how I got the idea for this experiment. About the sugar content. I feel otherwise there might be a risk of unevenly dissolved sugar which could lead to grittiness down the road Once most of the water has evaporated off, at that point what you are measuring is the temp of the boiling sugar.

I have to admit though, if you use a big pot, the boiling time is quite quick and the jam is done in under 10 minutes. It's entirely pot-size dependant well and also dependant on the volume of jam you are making.

For the photography: have you read "Plate to Pixel"? I cannot recommend it enough! I have a different approach. I like my marmalade to taste of fruit rather than sugar, so for many years I've been using much less sugar than most recipes suggest. The boil always took a long time, then one day I had a revelation. I love a good homemade marmalade — not the overly sweet, artificially flavored junk you find in the grocery store.

Just as the flavor of a homegrown tomato cannot compare to the grocery store version, so too is it with homemade marmalade. Many people think that making marmalade is too hard or even scary. But it really is not difficult — especially if you understand a few of the tricks. Now, I should start out by stating up front that although marmalade is not difficult or complicated…it CAN BE a bit more time consuming than your average jam.

I know that for me, setting aside time for a batch of marmalade can be very hard to carve out of my weekend. But this fact only makes homemade marmalade all the more precious in in my book.

Trust me. Once you make a batch and taste it, you will only give jars out to the most special people in your life. The rest you will hoard for yourself! Traditional marmalades include the peel of the citrus used.

For this reason, it is important that you use organic or homegrown fruit. Some states not California even allow the outside of the peel to be coated with a colored dye that is NOT food safe. Why you ask? Because they do not consider the peel to be edible and therefore feel it is okay.

By choosing organic produce, you avoid the dye. But you still need to wash the fruit with warm water and a vegetable brush because many fruits are coated in a wax.