Jam Experiments

Not to be deterred by my first experience with marmalade, I decided to try a simpler recipe and work  up from there. Here, we boiled thinly sliced pieces of orange in six cups of water for an hour. We included the zest and the juice of one lemon into the mix.

After an hour of boiling it down, when the pulp and the pith of the oranges had separated from the rind, I put in three cups of sugar. I kept cooking at medium for another hour.

The end result was a thick, deep orange marmalade. We kept it simple – we didn’t add any other ingredients to the mixture. It tastes like a lovely, classic, British marmalade.

I am much happier with this marmalade than I was with the previous one. However, it is a simple marmalade. Next, we would like to try a more complex marmalade, which has a jelly like texture with bits of rind floating in it. This marmalade has a large quantity or pulp and pith in it. While it has a delicious, simple flavor, it’s texture is not as sophisticated as some versions of marmalade.

Also, since orange has a very large quantity of pectin in its pith and rind, we did not have to use any commercial pectin. This made for a much smoother consistency than the previous lemon marmalade.

Ingredients:

• Six medium sized navel oranges
• Zest and juice of one lemon
• 6 cups of water
• 3 cups of sugar