Reinterred: Seville Orange Marmalade

Wednesday 16 February 2022

Seville Orange Marmalade

Yesterday I labelled my latest produce, some Seville Orange Marmalade.

Last week I spotted some Seville Oranges on the market at £2 for 3lb. It gave me an idea. I'd never made any marmalade. How about giving it a go? So I bought them and got some sugar and set to it on Sunday afternoon. I found this recipe from Delia Smith had some good reviews so used that.

As I squeezed my oranges, I collected the pips and bits of pith in a muslin.

Then it was the painstaking job of slicing the peel. I wanted to keep it with quite thick and large pieces so did it by hand rather than whizz in the food processor.

Then came the boil.

You can see my muslin bag with the pips and pith which I tied with string and attached to the pan handle. Within about 2 hours, the peel was soft enough to break when squeezed between thumb and forefinger.

I removed the muslin bag and after the evening meal, I added the sugar, dissolved it on a low heat, squeezed the pectin out of the muslin bag and turned up the heat. I got a lovely rolling boil going.

After boiling for 15 minutes, I used the cold plate test three times, returning to the boil for another 5 minutes in between until I saw a bit of wrinkling when I pushed it after cooling, I left the marmalade for 20 minutes and then transferred to jars.

But after a couple of hours in the fridge, when I tried some from my green jar of leftovers, it tasted gorgeous but seemed a bit too runny, so on Monday morning, when it still hadn't set to my liking, I emptied all the jars back into the pan, added a bit more sugar and some orange juice and boiled again for another 15 minutes or so until I got rather more wrinkling from the cold plate test. Here are the jars after filling a second time, looking a little darker now.