Adventures in Marmalade.

Living in the Pacific Northwest, I was definitely not going to be able to fulfill the local requirement in Tigress' Canning Challenge, especially one issued in January.  But, driving to work, I saw a reader board that said, “Limes 5/$1.00” I figured if I could not do local, at least I could do cheap.

So, I asked the fabulous canner, Magpie for a lime marmalade recipe and she sent me this one:

12 ripe limes

12 cups water

Sugar

Peel the zest from the limes with a vegetable peeler and cut it into very fine shreds. Cut the pith from the limes and reserve. Chop the flesh into fine slices and reserve any seeds. Place the lime slices and any juice, along with the zest shreds, into a jam pan or large saucepan. Tie the pith and the seeds into a muslin bag (note: I used cheesecloth and made my own bag) and add it to the pan. Add the water and place the pan over medium heat. Bring to a boil and simmer until the liquid is reduced by half. Squeeze and discard the bag. Measure the pulp and return to the pan, adding 1 cup sugar per cup of pulp. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat and boil the marmalade rapidly until the setting point is reached, about 30 minutes. Skim off any scum on the surface. Remove the pan from the heat and let stand 10 minutes. Stir well and ladle the marmalade into warmed, sterilized jars and seal them when the marmalade is cool. Makes about 8 cups.

From the Art of Preserving by Jan Berry.

Sounds so simple right? Ha! For one thing, cutting the pith from the limes is a terribly labor intensive task, one that made my hand look like Chandler’s video game claw. When I was finally done, the boiling and simmering until the liquid was reduced by half took a REALLY long time.

I’d never used a recipe with a setting point,  so I wasn’t quite sure when that was reached.  I finally had it boiling rapidly on the stove, and The Oldest came down to taste some.  When he had a bit, he said, “huh, look what that is doing on the spoon” and it was sheeting like the books showed.  Looking back, at this time, I should have canned it, but I thought perhaps ten more minutes to be sure that it was really jelled.  The next thing I knew, Dh came into the door and said, “did you know your marmalade was boiling over?” There was a sticky, gooey mess all over the stove (which smelled like roasted marshmallows due to the sugar content) and my marmalade is well caramelized. Well caramelized  marmalade is, I suspect, an acquired taste – one that my family will have to get used to.

Anyway, not being comfortable with the preserving directions, I ladled the remaining marmalade into the jars, and water bath canned them 15 minutes (there was a range of 10-15 minutes in the other marmalade recipes in my Big Ball Book)

The stove is now scraped, cleaned and shining, and hopefully it’ll resume lighting with the ignition instead of matches soon.

All and all, I look forward to enjoying the marmalade, and it was a good experience. As every canning experience teaches me something, the next marmalade will not be as pithy, so it's not quite so tart (and also not overboiled, naturally) and when I do this next year, my citrus entry will be blueberry-lime jam