preserving 2.0

okay, so yesterday we discussed the fact that when i learn practical skills i tend towards needing repetition in order to feel competent in my technique. hence my aims to both bake bread and practice preserving techniques once a week this year. with bread baking i feel i am deliberately keeping things slow and steady, i mean, a more adventurous person than myself would have probably made the basic bread recipe once and then skipped the chapter and gone on to something more adventurous, like, say, ciabatta, or pitta breads. not i darlings, i've still got several basic variants to experiment with; besides which i rather like the fact i'm creating a home environment in which there is always a handmade loaf on the go and one languishing in the freezer, ready to be refreshed in the oven, crisp and airy as new. i'm not going to mess with the formula, but i am going to move away from basic white bread via the medium of more interesting flours, nuts, and seeds.

with preserves, things are different. preserving is, naturally, dictated by the seasons; you want to preserve some of what is good for when none of it is around. so my patience-reliant learning technique pays off, here. january will naturally be spent making various types of marmalade, since there's not much more than citrus fruits available (although i'm getting seriously impatient about forced rhubarb. seriously, wherefore art it?). i don't mind this, i like trying slight variants on the same technique: see for reference the great houmous challenge of summer 2010, helped massively by living 2 seconds away from a middle eastern supermarket, not to mention shocking it's owner by my ability to lift several kilos of chickpeas with no visible strain. put it this way, they've got nothing on beer barrels.

so yes, you guessed it, i made marmalade again. i hunted high and low for seville oranges (i want some for a fabulous infused gin recipe i've seen, too) but could not find any, so had to make do with valencia oranges, which was a bit disappointing. i prefer seville oranges in general, and back in the days of being an omnivore, used them pretty much everywhere i would have used lemons for the entirety of their brief season. the flesh was particularly wonderful in a variant on a salad an ex girlfriend used to make to serve with fish, that involved rough chunks of it, black olives, mint, and the tiniest amount of feta cheese (the original salad was with pink grapefruits). this seville take on nostalgia was better with oiler fish like mackerel, than the grilled white fish she preferred, mind, which would have sent my calorie conscious ex into a stuttering fit of how long it would take you to burn them off. are you beginning to see why she had to go?

anyway, back to marmalade. i used the same recipe from the river cottage preserves handbook i used for my previous attempt but rather than use a kilo of lemons, i used a kilo of oranges, which meant i had to add 75ml lemon juice when i added the sugar. again, i have tried to take as many process pictures for you as possible, not just to keep as a record of my own learning, but to try and convey what things should look like at various stages of the proceedings.

this is my peel, shredded and soaking in water and its own juice, done the day before i want to make the marmalade. to the left of it you can see a plastic bowl in a debenhams back. this is the bread from the previous post rising, i'm a bit of a kitchen multitasker so i shredded my peel in the rising time. this having several things on the go at once and losing entire days in the kitchen was a habit i picked up in my dissertation writing days when i'd typically have written a chapter and therefore needed to get some headspace before i went back to edit. the peel swells up to almost double it's size at this stage, and honestly, i think i need to work on getting a finer shred (i am categorically not helped by the fact i'm the only one who ever sharpens the knives in this gaff).


okay, so having simmered said peel mixture for roughly two hours, this is my mixture after i added my 2 kilos of demerara sugar and my 75ml lemon juice. it is literally just coming up to it's full boil and as you can see it's about 2cm off the top of the pan. i know i am using a pan that is not big enough, and consequently at the boil stage i have to watch my mixture like a hawk to make sure it doesn't spill over. luckily this is only 20-25 minutes long, so ample time for caffeine and a cigarette and maybe a little singalong to the al green you're listening to. i got paid like, double what i thought i would this month, so along with a couple of books recommended to me by my trainer on wednesday about wine, i'm going to invest in a preserving pan. they're about 9 litres in capacity, and they have volume measurements on the inside so you can see how much your liquid has decreased. handy.

okay, and this is my marmalade after it has reached setting point and been taken off the hob to cool. i guess you can see that some of it did go a little crazy and go all over the hob (and was subsequently a bastard to clean off), but i managed to catch it before we had like, biblical levels of marmalade flood in the kitchen, so nothing too terrible. you can also just about see the lids in their pan of boiling water. at this stage i added 50ml (probably more, if i'm not pouring with a measure i get a little overeager) of scotch. i used glenturret 12 year old; which may seem slightly extravagant but it does have citrussy notes to it; so it seemed like a good little match. is it extravagant to use single malts in marmalade? yeah most probably, but i'm just that kind of girl.

and here are my little beauties all jarred up. the smaller jars are 300ml, the larger 450ml. the tiniest one is i think only a 250ml. you'd have to be hawkeyed to spot that one of these also says 'reserved for ed' on it, i reckon, but he will be the recipient of a jar from each batch when we go for a beer or several on monday (i owe him big time for listening to my whining earlier this year, but we've both since remembered the last time we got drunk together and are fearing for our livers big time). i am always fascinated by how pretty they look in their jars-there's almost a marine-life-in-sepia quality to them that i love.

okay, and this is a close up on one of the jars, just to show that while i did get a more even peel distribution this time, it was still far from perfect. i think perhaps, again, i needed more patience in the cooling time.

i'm not sure what i'll make next. since i'm going to be busy being drunk and then hungover in the early half of the week i thought that maybe rather than a two-part process like the marmalade i might perhaps make preserved lemons. given my love of the humble chickpea and my overliberality with the spices, i make a lot of moroccan influenced dishes and i feel that my own preserved lemons would be a fantastic addition to my storecupboard. i also have plans for early rhubarb jam the minute i find some, and i've still got enough sloes in the freezer to make a couple of bottles of gin, so the preserving every week will continue until i am overrun with jars and bottles.