Nobody else in the house eats marmalade but that won’t stop me. A few years back I made grapefruit marmalade as well as a mandarin marmalade using fruit from a neighbour’s trees in Mt Albert. This year I bought oranges from Riverford but I still used the same good old New Zealand recipe that my mum used to make.
Ingredients
1.25kg sweet oranges
2 lemons
1.5 litres water
Sugar
Method
Juice the oranges and lemons and finely shred the skins.
Keep the pips and tie them into into a piece of muslin ensuring no loose bits of cotton will come off and fall into the marmalade.
In your biggest saucepan or pot gently boil the juice, the skins, the pips and the water until the skins are tender – around an hour. Leave to cool a bit and then measure how much pulp you have – and return it back to the pot.
While you are waiting for the skins to become tender you can sterilise your jars in the oven. Wash them in hot soapy water, rinse and dry and place in a 120°C oven for half an hour.
You will need to match the amount of pulp with sugar.
Bring the pulp to the boil and add the sugar, stirring all the time until the sugar has dissolved.
Now boil briskly watching very carefully and ideally having some form of hand protection if you need to stir – as it is now very very hot! After about 20 minutes the marmalade should reach setting point.
You can test for setting point by spooning some of the marmalade onto a plate. Leave it to cool a bit. It will wrinkle when you push your finger into it and if you draw your finger through it the channel will stay and not fill back in with marmalade.
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