First off, I'm not a big fan of jellies and jams that you buy in the store. Perhaps I was spoiled as a child to have my mother's fresh strawberry and peach jams all the time. I find the store bought stuff much too sweet and not really tasting like the fruit it is supposed to represent. So I hardly touch the stuff. Homeade, however, has my full attention. There is nothing better than sweet strawberry jam made from berries you helped pick, with no added sweetener and frozen to keep as fresh as possible. It's like opening a jar of summer. (My family loves Mom's strawberry freezer jam, although I'm the only one who likes it with no sugar added. :)
If there is one kind of store bought jam that I will eat, it is marmalade. I think it is because of the slight bitterness in the rinds and the deepness of flavors that I like it so much. I've long wanted to try making orange marmalade, and just lacked the opportunity.
Now, kumquats. Have you ever seen them? They are a small, grape-sized citrus fruit. You eat kumquats whole, peel and all, removing the seeds of course. The inside is sour and the peel is actually sweet. The best ones I've ever had were at my friend's house in Louisiana, where we picked them right off the trees in her yard, still warm from the sun, and ate them on her back porch. Yesterday I found a bag of kumquats for P10 - which is about $1.75. Thrilled I was, until I got them home, and realized they were more sour than any I've ever had before. They were almost too sour... I could only eat two or three at a time before my tongue felt numb.
Which is when the thought of making marmalade out of them occurred to me. A quick search and I found a doable
recipe - calling for nothing but kumquats, a couple oranges, sugar, and lemon juice. No added pectin, no strange ingredients, just time. I'll do it, I thought!
But of course I couldn't follow the recipe exactly. First, because I'm me, and I never do. Second, because I'm in Africa and chances are when you want to make something, you will be unable to find a needed ingredient. And when you can't find something at one store, you usually can't find it at any store. It happens - far too often. So it didn't surprise me that I couldn't find any oranges. How about grapefruit, I thought? The recipe called for two oranges, but since I had one large grapefruit languishing in the drawer of my fridge, I decided to use it instead. I love grapefruit - its slight bitterness, its complex flavors.
I cleaned, destemmed and deseeded everything, thinly slicing and then chopping the rinds into small chunks. I put it all in a big pot and added a lot of water and let it sit overnight. The next morning I slowly simmered it until most of the water had evaporated, leaving the rinds very soft. I braved a taste. Ick! It was so bitter! So sour! So... grapefruity!
Pressing on, I added the called-for amount of sugar. At first, I thought about cutting back, since I don't like things too sweet. But since grapefruit isn't as sweet as the oranges that were called for, I put in the full amount of sugar. I tasted again. It was better, but there was still that definite bitter grapefruit taste. Oh dear. I put in a bit more sugar, but it didn't help.
So back to the search engines, where I found posts from other people who have done the same thing. Apparently, oranges, lemons, kumquats, and other various citrus fruits can be chopped up whole and added to marmalade. However, grapefruits are the exception. The peel must be carefully separated, then the juice extracted, throwing everything else away. Evidently, the white pithy part is what makes it bitter. Hhhmm... oops.
The art of substitution! Rather than scrap the whole batch, I decided to keep going and add some more stuff, thinking that if the grapefruit wasn't as prominent in the marmalade, it wouldn't be as bitter. I chopped up the rest of the kumquats I had on hand, simmered them down and added them in. I added three cans of pineapple. I added some fresh-grated vanilla bean (probably the best addition, in my mind). And I added lots more sugar. Once the sugar was doubled, I stopped keeping track of how much I was dumping in.
The final result... is edible. I even think it is good. It does have a strong grapefruit-bitterness to it, but that's not all uncommon in marmalade, and probably why a lot of people don't prefer it. Whether others in my family will eat it remains to be seen. One thing's for sure, we have a lot of it. What was originally supposed to be 4 pints turned into two quart jars and five small jam jars (375 ml each... just shy of a pint, I think, which means I at least doubled my efforts).
All in all, it was a fun adventure. I enjoyed the process of making a set-up jam without any pectin or gelatin - that was a first for me. I also enjoyed the canning process. Though I've helped my mom can in the past, I've never done the process start to finish by myself, and it's been so long since we've done canning that I was glad to have her coaching at each step. The jars all seem to have set up well, so that part at least looks like it was a success!
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