Marmalade Season

I knew about marmalade long before I tasted it. My mother used the word "marmalade" to explain to her piano students how to count out triplets in 6/8 time signature. 

"Mar-ma-lade, mar-ma-lade, mar-ma-lade."

But never having heard very nice things about the taste of marmalade (it was bitter, they told me) I stuck with my sweet, fruity, Sure-Jell thickened jams for years after learning its existence. Occasionally, I'd glance at the Smuckers Orange marmalade on the grocery store shelves and wonder what the heck jam made out of citrus tasted like.

I found out at a London breakfast table where, in the basement dining room of a bed and breakfast, I discovered orange marmalade was the only preserve available to spread on my toast. I spread a tentative blob on a corner of toast and apprehensively took a bite. It was bitter, but then sweet, and actually quite refreshing. There was something very nice about how the bitter citrus peel in the marmalade blended with the creamy, sweet butter spread across a crispy, nearly room temperature piece of whole grain toast.

I stopped fearing marmalade after that first taste and actually came to look forward to finding it at the breakfast table for the rest of that week. But back Stateside, I felt no desire to keep a jar of marmalade in the fridge. There was something awfully romantic about smearing orange marmalade on your toast to start off a day of touring London and honestly, I wasn't sure it would taste as good back home.    

I never thought of making my own marmalade until last year when I noticed a recipe for orange marmalade on the Sure-Jell packet. Then I discovered Marisa McCellan's recipe for three citrus marmalade last January and I knew I had to try it.

In the midst of January, when I'm pretty sure nothing will ever grow again, it's lovely to fill your home with the smell of citrus. It reminds me of far off places - both places where the sun shines and citrus trees grow, and also the orangeries of England where the well-to-do kept potted citrus plants centuries ago. (Fyi: the orangery at Kensington Palace is now a lovely little tea house if you're ever in Kensington and fancying a pot of tea and slice of Victoria Sponge Cake.) I highly recommend making marmalade on days where the temperature's not predicted to rise past zero. It's a wonderful escape.

Three-Citrus Marmalade made with lemons, navel oranges, and white grapefruit

Making marmalade's quite the process - plan on it taking more time then seems humanly possible. It's best to use organic fruit since you use the peels and you really don't want nasty chemicals (or wax) in your marmalade. First you wash your fruit and peel it. The peeled fruit must be supremed (where you remove all of the fruit from its membranes) and the seeds removed. The diced peels get simmered for a half hour or so until they're tender and then peels get combined with sugar, the citrus fruit and juice, and some of the water  from cooking the peels. Then just boil that all until it reaches the gelling point and can it. Simple enough, but last Wednesday I started making marmalade at noon and didn't finish up until 8 at night. (There were some interruptions, I'll admit, such as climbing on top of the roof to melt out the bathroom vent.)

I've been anticipating this year's marmalade for a while now because the marmalade I made last January was gone by May and because I had a beautiful new maslin pan to test out. The maslin pan is specially designed for making jam and marmalade. It has a handle, a pour spout, and a thick bottom to evenly distribute the heat.

My lucky marmalade got to take two trips through the maslin pan because someone wasn't patient enough when waiting for the marmalade to hit the set point and the first go around I canned what was essentially citrus syrup. (Lesson learned.)

Speaking of which, does anyone have any tips about when to stop cooking marmalade to achieve the proper set? Last year's batch was most definitely overcooked (as in it was a couple steps away from being hard candy) but still edible. This year's did end up setting quite nicely, but I feel like my marmalade doesn't reach a set I like until it's sustaining 224 F. (It should set at 220F.) Anyone? Anyone? The saucer test doesn't seem to work for me. I feel like I could drop little dabs of the cooked marmalade onto frozen saucers until the cows come home and I still can't tell exactly what the marmalade's consistency will be once it's completely cooled.

Despite the frustrations, I'm so happy to have marmalade back in my pantry. I still like it best on buttered (but slightly cooled) toast, but you can also throw a dollop in with sauteed chicken, soy sauce, ginger and Sriracha to make an orange chicken stir-fry. If I can find tangerines, I may be trying out a tangerine vanilla marmalade in the near future from Elizabeth Field's Marmalade book. Apparently I've become something of a marmalade nut.

Do you like the taste of marmalade?

Read more ...

Canning Roughing It

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve become a pretty persistent wild strawberry picker. I wouldn’t normally devote much time to picking these teeny little berries that are usually few and far apart, but this summer I’ve found a couple fruitful strawberry patches where the fruit is fairly concentrated and the berries are bigger than I’ve ever seen a wild strawberry before: about the size of a Gobstopper. On an average evening of picking, I come home with about a cup of berries. Still, picking wild strawberries involves a fair amount of ditch diving – that is, squatting along the side of gravel roads, pawing through strawberry foliage – before you’ve gathered enough berries to amount to anything.

I read a local cookbook this spring that put the crazy idea of making wild strawberry jam into my head and I’ve been diligently gathering strawberries to make a batch. Then, at some point this week, the magic berry switch must have been flicked. Suddenly ripe raspberries and blueberries are popping up all over to join the strawberries. By Friday it was becoming apparent that it was time to finish up with the my putzy wild strawberry jam project so I could devote my full attention to the raspberries and blueberries (aka, the big guns).

Yes, I realize that making wild strawberry jam sounds pretty idealistic when you live in a cabin in the woods. Since today I headed into town to use my mother’s canning equipment to make my strawberry jam, I thought I’d share how you too can make strawberry jam.

Step 1) Pick as many wild strawberries as you possibly can. This is a project to spread out over several days as you’ll probably spend more time searching for berries than actually picking. (I froze my berries while I waited to accumulate enough for jam.)

Step 2) Once you've got a big bag full, mash up all your wild strawberries and see what it amounts to. (As of last night I had a 3 ½ cups of mashed wild strawberries. I needed 5 cups for a batch of cooked strawberry jam.)

Step 3) Go to the grocery store and buy a couple pints of strawberries. After all, you have a full time job and a grand opening at work in a week. And if you keep squatting on the side of the road with a berry basket, soon or later, you’ll get hit. And are you really sure you haven’t been picking berries on private property?!

Step 4) Cook your jam according to the Sure-Jell package directions.

Step 5) Admire your rows of jam.

So maybe not totally “Little House in the Big Woods” style, but still, homemade jam is homemade jam, even if my wild strawberry jam is slightly domesticated.

Don’t worry, I do have some standards. After I finished up with the strawberry jam this afternoon, I chopped up all the homegrown rhubarb that’s been hanging out in our fridge to make a batch of rhubarb marmalade.

Of course, the secret ingredient to make rhubarb marmalade set is Strawberry Jell-O.

Read more ...

Encounters with Bruno and the Quest for Wild Strawberry Jam

You’d think with the days reaching their longest lengths of the year, it would seem like the days laze slowly passed this time of year. But it doesn’t feel like that at all. The days of June have gone by as though they were pages in a flipbook.

As we all run around like chickens’ with our heads cut off, there’s plenty to take pause over. The night before last, a couple of loons set to caterwauling in the bay. Yesterday morning, we discovered the reason behind the ruckus. They had a baby! It’s the first loon chick that’s been spot in the bay for a couple years and everyone’s pretty tickled by the little guy.

I helped a turtle across the road on my walk home yesterday. I know it’s probably not my place to interrupt the natural way things are done, but I’d hate to have turtle roadkill if I could have done something to prevent it. The turtle wasn’t thrilled with the helpful hand I leant (there were a couple twitches of his limbs), but he seemed all right once I set him down quietly on the far side of the road.

A little farther along on my walk, I ran into a black bear. The bear was pretty oblivious to my presence and at one point I thought the bear had wandered off in the woods, only to see him come meandering across the road headed the other way. When it became apparent that Mr. Bear had no intention of ceding the road over to me, I clapped my hands and yelled at him. He took off running, the pads of his feet smacking the pavement before he crashed into the woods. I definitely gave him a bigger scare than he gave me. It was a fairly large bear with a glossy full coat: looks as though our neighbors’ bird seed is treating him well!

This spring I read a cookbook that mentioned making a batch of wild strawberry jam. Last year I made wild blueberry and raspberry jam, but because wild strawberries are not particularly abundant and usually too small to justify the effort of picking them and certainly not worth the trouble of turning them into jam. But this year the wild strawberries are out in full force along the roadside and I thought, well, maybe I could gather enough for a batch of jam if I just go out for a little while each evening. Yes, berry season is officially upon us.

Are there better ways I could be spending my evening hours other than being crouched down in a berry patch? Probably. But, all the other ways I can think to spend that time don’t have nearly as delicious results.

I already have a cup and a 1/3 of wild strawberries in the freezer, right next to the container of rhubarb sauce. The summer harvest is starting to amass.

The three articles are written. Huzzah!

(P.S. I left my camera at work last night, but will post pictures when I get home today.)

Read more ...