Last weekend my husband and I headed down to FL to visit some family. My family has owned an orange grove for about 100 years. I freely admit that I'm a citrus snob because once you've eaten real, fresh oranges out of the grove you'll never go back to store bought. There is simply no comparison.
At any rate, we ended up coming home with a bag of grapefruit, a bag of navels and about two and a half bags of tangerines. I section and supreme the navels and grapefruits and we eat bowlfuls for breakfast. Great stuff! Usually, I just peel and eat the tangerines for lunch and as snacks. But this year, our favorite tangerine tree had a bumper crop. Actually, it appeared to have double, overlapping crops. We've been eating tangerines since about Nov. The tree has been unbelievably loaded. I sometimes eat up to 5 tangerines a day, but I'm not even making a dent in what we brought home with us.
Today it struck me that I should make tangerine marmalade. So I did. Below is a step-by-step guide, but at the end I'll mention what I would have done differently.
Step 1: Collect and wash citrus. Since we're going to be using the peels, it's very important to wash throughly. Mine were covered in grove dirt, so I soaked, washed, and scrubbed these. I started out with about 14 tangerines. Our tree is about 60 years old and we don't spray it, so the tangerines may look blemished and small compared to grocery store fruit. But they're completely ripe.
Step 2: The next step is to peel the tangerines, discarding the blemished peel and buds/buttons. Eventually, you're left with peeled tangerines, a bowlful of peel, and a handful of scraps.
Step 3: After you've got all the tangerines peeled, the next step is to cut up the peel. These tangerines have very little pith (the white stuff on the inside of the peel) on them, so I didn't worry about scraping them much. I found a pair of scissors to be very useful in cutting the strips of peel. There's no reason you can't use a knife or food processors and just chop them up; I just like the look of the long strips in the marmalade. You only need 1 c. of peels, so you can stop when you get that (it will only be maybe 4-5 tangerine's worth of peels) or you can snip them all up and use the rest for candied orange peels.
Step 4: Put 1 c. of peels in a saucepan and just cover with water. Bring to a boil and boil about 8-10 minutes while you move on to Step 5. When the peels are done cooking, just drain and rinse them and then leave them to sit until you're ready for them.
Step 5: This is the very laborious part of tangerine marmalade. Section the fruit and remove the pith, membrane, and seeds. This take forever. The easiest way I found is shown in the 3 pictures below. I would rip the small vein out of the center of each section, much like stringing green beans. Then I would peel both sides back and almost turn the section inside out. This preserved much of the fruit for each section. I didn't worry overly much about getting all the fruit away from the membrane, particularly for the smaller sections. The goal isn't to get every last bit, so I would occasionally just squeeze the juice out of some recalcitrant section and move on. By the end of Step 5, I was eating the smaller sections so I didn't have to deal with them.
Step 6: Take a break, have lunch and contemplate the lovely bowl of fruit you have. The smaller red bowl behind the large glass one contains the pith and membranes. I did a couple stirs of the larger bowl and picked out seeds and bits of pith.
Step 7: Finally ready to make marmalade!
1 c. peels
all fruit segments and juice
7 c. sugar
3oz (half pouch) of liquid pectin
I'm going to assume people reading this have canned before and know how to prep jelly jars, lids, etc. and know the basic routine.
Put peels, all fruit segments and juice, and sugar into a large pot. This jam foams up much more than any other I've worked with, so make sure to use a big pot. Don't skimp. Slowly bring it up to a boil being careful not to scorch the sugar.
A lot of recipes add water, but I don't. When you first start stirring, it will appear to be a solid mass of sugar. Don't worry about it. The fruit will break down and release plenty of juice. Once it's at a rolling boil, stir in liquid pectin. Process until jam is ready (people determine this in a variety of ways; in my family, we use the fork test: when you dip a fork in the jam and it coats between the tines on the fork and doesn't break up, it's ready). Ladle into hot, sterilized jars and seal.
As you can see, when you first process the jars, the parts of the oranges that didn't break down will float to the top. It's pretty, but not what we're used to seeing for marmalade (my husband kindly pointed this out to me). Flip the jars upside down about about an hour and then rightside up after another hour. This will help distribute the peels throughout the marmalade.
Step 8: Make fresh bread and enjoy. My opinion is that this marmalade is much more intensely flavored than store bought. The tangerine taste lingers in a very aromatic way. I like it, and I'm not normally a fan of marmalades.
Lessons learned: Tangerine marmalade is really, really labor intensive. Mostly because of the sectioning of the fruit. Tangerines don't section nearly as nicely as other citrus fruits. In the future, I think I would make this with some of the juice oranges we have on our property rather than tangerines. The tangerines do have a lovely flavor, and the bright orange skins make a beautiful presentation. Tangerine marmalade is probably best for a nice gift rather than for everyday eating. But now I have about 8 half-pints ready for the rest of the year.
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