Seville Orange Marmalade

Hi everyone! It's been a while, I've been so busy (which is unusual for little housewife me) and haven't had the spare time to write a post. My husband Tom is in the thick of PhD applications and I've been following him around to all his interviews and scoping out the new cities, one of which may be our new home in six months. It's all very exciting, I get itchy feet and like a change up now and again, and it's kept me very busy (or at least very out of the house) for the past couple weeks. But not too busy to get up to some other things! So probably a few posts in a row coming in the next couple of days since everything has slowed down to a normal pace again.
Biggest and best thing first! A couple weeks ago, Tom and I did our Saturday trip to the Lancaster farmer's market to pick up our veg. There is a great local greengrocers that set up shop in Market Square every Wednesday and Saturday and the veg is much higher quality and much much cheaper then the supermarkets, so we've started supporting our local farmers and small businesses and saving ourselves some cash. The best bit is that they occasionally supply stuff that you wouldn't normally be able to find at the supermarket, and on this particular trip they had an entire crate of Seville Oranges!

A few of my Seville Oranges

For those of you not in the know, Seville Oranges are a sour variety of orange, almost exclusively used to make Marmalade. You definitely wouldn't want to eat one of these things fresh out of the peel, believe me I tried, VERY sour! But for good, bitter, moreish marmalade there is absolutely nothing better. Imagine my surprise, first at seeing them at all, (they're seasonal and usually only found around December and even then I've never found them before) and then to discover that they were selling them 10 for 50p! I bought 20 and skipped home very excited about my purchase. Then I got home and realised that I didn't have any jars, so the oranges went straight into the fridge for a couple days while I waited for my jars to arrive from Jam Jar Shop. 

My jamming bible.

The busy week began and even though my jars had arrived it was still a day or two before I had time to clean up my kitchen and make a batch of marmalade. I modified a recipe for Sweet Orange Marmalade from a book my sister gave me for Christmas by Linda Ziedrich, The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and other Sweet Preserves. Basically she's from the States and it's even harder to find sour varieties of oranges there then it is here in the UK, so she created a recipe including a significant amount of lemon juice to offset the sweetness of the oranges and make her marmalade bitter, I just omitted the lemon juice and used less sugar. I use less sugar than recipes call for as a rule generally, I find a lot of the jams are far too sweet and lose the fruity flavours, so I 'sweeten to taste', especially with fruits high in natural pectin, since I don't have to worry so much about them setting properly.
Anyway, the recipe was a good guideline for water and sugar content, although she does fail to suggest a cook time, so I spent the entire first batch testing for a set every five minutes for almost an hour, which is annoying. I will say that marmalade is by far the most labour intensive preserve I've tackled, it's a good hour and a half juicing, de-membraning and finely slicing the peels, I wished several times that I had a juicer, may need to invest in one if I tackle this on a larger scale. Then it's two hours of boiling the water, juice and peels with the sack of pits and pith, just enough time to get all the sticky juice and bits of membrane off my kitchen surfaces, have my afternoon cup of tea and watch the Alan Titchmarsh Show. Then in goes the sugar, and a lot of it, the recipe called for 9 cups, I cut it back to around 6 and liked the result, but I like my marmalade quite bitter.

My finished Seville Orange Marmalade.

The one thing I noticed (besides the flavour) about using Seville oranges as opposed to the sweet orange varieties we're used to seeing in the shops is how the peel turned out at the end. The Seville peels really softened up a great deal more than the sweet orange peels I've used in the past. I had some marmalade on my toast this morning and almost felt that the bitty bits weren't bitty enough. I'd cut the peels quite fine because my last batch of Sweet Orange Marmalade had been too bitty and the peels were really quite tough still. So I suppose I've produced a 'fine cut' marmalade, and I shall endeavour to do a 'medium to thick cut' batch with the remainder of my oranges.
Overall I think it came out quite well, I taste tested on my husband and he really doesn't like marmalade, so it was a bit encouraging when he told me straight away the he didn't really like it, but it tasted just like marmalade. I've sent a pot off to my in-laws and Tom's Grandma, who will probably be brutally honest in her opinion. And I've got a whole bunch of 7oz jars left over to sell on Etsy, BUY SOME HERE!