Contents:
- How to prepare orange marmalade
- Ingredients
- Procedure
- Cooking
- What to pair with orange marmalade
- Preserving
Winter is almost here, with its perfumes and its typical products, but for many people it’s simply orange time! Rich in vitamins, oranges have both anti-stress and antioxidant properties: they really are a panacea, a daily consumption of oranges strengthens the immune system.
Besides their health benefits, they are a delicious citrus fruit both to see and to taste. During the coldest months, oranges, tangerines and clementine colour our tables and they enrich lot of tasteful holiday recipes. How can we preserve this sweet and sour nectar and taste it all year long? Solution is quick and simple: an excellent homemade orange marmalade!
How to prepare orange marmalade
There are many ways to prepare homemade marmalades and jams, today we suggest a very simple procedure, using the same 3 ingredients our Lazzaris Organic orange marmalade is made of: organic untreated oranges (we will use pulp, juice and skin), brown sugar and lemon juice.
Ingredients
Here below you’ll find the ingredients to prepare your homemade marmalade:
- 2 kg of oranges
- Brown sugar the ratio between sugar and peeled oranges weight should be (1:2)
- Lemon juice
It is important to choose the right variety of oranges in order to realize a good marmalade, do not pick up the first bag of oranges that you find at the supermarket. Make sure you are buying Navel oranges, you can recognize them because of their “navel”, developing at the bottom of the fruit, opposite the steam. These oranges are perfect for marmalade, they are juicy and sweet, with low acidity.
Once you have chosen the ingredients we can discover how to prepare our delicious homemade marmalade.
Procedure
Let’s see this recipe step by step.
- Wash the oranges with warm water, to remove all impurities.
- Using a potato peeler, peal two or three oranges, we will use the skin during the preparation. Pay attention and separate skin from albedo, the white part of the skin, which has to be removed because of its bitterness.
- Cut the skin into stripes. The size depends on your taste, whether you like or not the crunchy consistency of the pieces while tasting your marmalade
- Boil the sliced orange skin for 3 or 4 minutes. Drain the strips and keep them aside.
- Pare off the oranges on a bow, without wasting the juice, make sure you remove the
- Slice the oranges and cut them in pieces.
- Weigh the pulp, in order to determine how much sugar you’ll have to add while cooking. We suggest 500 gr of brown sugar per kilo of pulp. Of course, you can add more or less sugar, depending on the sweetness degree you prefer for your marmalade.
Cooking
Cooking phase is very important, the mixture doesn’t have to cook too much.
- Before adding the sugar, pour the pulp in a pan and put it on the heat. Bring it to a boil and let simmer for 5 minutes.
- Turn the heat off and add sugar, orange skin stripes and lemon juice.
- Stir and put the pan again on a low heat for 40 more minutes. Sugar and pulp will slowly melt.
- Stir frequently to prevent your marmalade from sticking
Check if your marmalade is ready: pour a drop of marmalade on a dish, wait a few minutes and tilt the dish. If the marmalade slips slowly this means that the marmalade is ready, if it slips away this means it is not ready yet.
- Once the marmalade is ready, pour it into sterilized glass jars, leaving one cm of headspace.
- Turn the jars upside down to seal them and let them cool down.
If you love a sourer and bitter taste use Seville bitter oranges, in order to prepare the most loved marmalade in the United Kingdom! The recipe is the same: just remember to remove the seeds while peeling the oranges.
If you love spices and stronger tastes, you can flavour your orange marmalade with a cinnamon stick (every 500 gr of oranges) or a few vanilla beans while cooking.
What to pair with orange marmalade
Orange marmalade is a perfect paring both for savoury and sweet dishes.
It is the perfect filling for tarts, since the sweet taste of shortcrust pastry matches perfectly with the slightly bitter aftertaste of the orange marmalade, but you can also spread your orange marmalade on a toasted und buttered slice of wholemeal bread.
Try the orange marmalade with chocolate cakes or desserts: chocolate muffins or sponge cake filled with orange marmalade will immediately become more delicious. You can also use the orange marmalade in a more creative way, add it to the mixture for a soft almond cake.
What about savoury dishes? The strong flavour of oranges matches with ginger or chili pepper: your orange marmalade may become the perfect garnish for some meat dishes such as pork tenderloin or veal rolls. Orange marmalade fits especially with a cheese board, both fresh or seasoned cheeses such as goat’s milk cheese or crescenza.
We suggest you to accompany cheeses with our Organic Orange and Chilli Sauce, this will add to the pairing also a pungent flavour of mustard.
Preserving
Once the marmalade is sealed, we suggest to wait a week before eating the marmalade. If properly sealed it keeps up to 5 or 6 months in a cool and dry place. Since this marmalade has not preservatives, once you open the marmalade you can keep it in the fridge up to 2 weeks.
If you use bitter oranges, the conservation time will be shorter, up to 3 months if sealed and kept protected from light and heat, just a week once opened.
