This year I have refined and streamlined previous recipes and techniques.
Ratios: 1Kg Seville Oranges, the freshest and heaviest, 1 litre water, 3 lemons, 1.5 Kg Sugar
This amount of water is for chopped and prepared fruit which is first cooked in a pressure cooker for 14 minutes, and allowed to cool down slowly at room temperate.
Wash all the fruit well in warm water, drain.
Cut the oranges in half.
Squeeze all the juice over a strainer in a wide open jug or bowl
Remove all the membrane and pips, and put this on a large square of muslin
Cut the Orange skin and pith finely into the size bits you want in the marmalade.
Cut the lemons in half, and squeeze the juice over the strainer, to add to the orange juice.
For one batch this year I chopped up the lemon peel to add to the orange.
Bring up the edges of the muslin in which all the bits and pips are, and tie very securely with kitchen string.
Put all the chopped bits of peel in a large container, add the water, and add muslin bag. I used a three litre deep rectangular plastic box with lid. I then put the jug with juice on top of everything within the box, which means the bag of bits gets pushed under, put the lid on, and left it all to seep for 24 hrs. This softens the peel and allows a lot of pectin from the peel and pips to leach out into the water.
Once the soaking has taken place, put all the contents except for the jug of juice, into the pressure cooker, bring quickly to pressure and cook for 14 minutes. When it is down to room pressure, you may start the remainder of the process, or you could leave this for another few hours. Take the unopened muslin bag with its contents, and in a big sieve balanced over a bowl, twist the top, and press with a large spoon, to extract as much as the juice as possible. The other alternative is to open the bag, put the contents in a sieve, and using a spoon, try to pass a fair quantity of gooey pulp into a bowl, which is then added to the preserving pan.
I like to add the juice only after the oranges are cooked at the final stage when using the large preserving pan to boil up the fruit and sugar, as thisgives a fresher flavour to the marmalade.
Weigh the sugar in a large preserving pan. The pressure cooker is likely to be too small to allow for the rise in the boiling marmalade. Add the fresh juice together with the contents of the pressure cooker. Continue to make your marmalade in the usual way.
This batch was made with just lemon juice and no peel, along with Sevilles
The chopped lemon peel gives a marmalade with two different coloured peels. The pith on the lemon remains a little more opaque, obvious in the picture below.
The lemon peel from the other batch was used to make crystallized lemon peel to add to one of our favourite breakfast buns: lemon and ginger buns, which I have made at least five times!
