Recipe:Big Batch Marmalade
A question came from the audience at my recent marmalade demo at Surfas: "Can you double the recipe?"
My answer at the time was "No." Today my answer is "Yes and No."
"Yes" because of course you can double or even quadruple this recipe without doing higher math, since the recipe is nothing more than a basic ratio (by weight) of 1 part sugar to 1 part prepared citrus peel and pulp. And when you get down to it, marmalade—like any other sweet preserve—is only fruit cooked with sugar and maybe a little water.
That water, however, is the rub.
A sweet preserve develops its characteristic and desirable flavor, consistency and concentration (which discourages microbial growth) because you cook it long enough to boil away—to evaporate—a quantity of water sufficient to cause the preserve to thicken and jell. When the temperature inside the preserving pan reaches 212 degrees, its water content escapes as vapor through the surface of the hot preserve. The surface area of the preserve determines how quickly evaporation takes place. The greater the surface area in relation to the overall volume, the quicker the evaporation. It's all elementary physics, which is all the physics I know.
Now normally you don't need to worry about the physics of making sweet preserves because the typical recipe—one calling for two to three pounds of fruit—is scaled to the dimensions of average cooking pots. My usual preserving pan is a 6-quart enameled iron pot that measures 10.25" in diameter at the inside lip. That's big for a home cook, the kind of thing you might use to boil a whole chicken or maybe even two. But still, you probably have something similar in your kitchen.
When making a "single" recipe of preserves, the ingredients fill my 6-quart pot about 2 inches deep, give or take, which means plenty of surface area relative to volume.
Now imagine doubling the recipe in that same pot: twice as much volume but the same surface area. You'd have to cook the double-batch of preserves much, much longer to evaporate the doubled quantity of liquid. That's too long: the flavor and quality of your preserve will likely suffer as a result. And if nothing else, you might die of boredom while stirring the pot for 90 minutes.
When I want to double a recipe for a big batch, I pull out my biggest pan, which is 13.5" in diameter. That's restaurant size. (Pictured ABOVE with six-quart pot and a lemon for scale.) In this giant pot, a double batch is about 2 inches deep: there's still plenty of surface area in relation to the overall volume, and so the cooking time remains manageable.
Even so, I approach a double batch of preserves as I would approach any other big task like cleaning out the garage: I prepare myself mentally and set aside plenty of time to do the work.
The other day I worked up this recipe for BIG BATCH MARMALADE using 5 pounds of blood oranges and 1 pound of Eureka lemons. Using the big pot, I had to really crank up the flame on my stove to get it boiling, so I never once took my eyes off the stove. I stirred the hot mixture constantly. The phone rang and I ignored it. Mathew came over and I shouted for him to let himself in. I would not be interrupted from my work, lest the marmalade scorch. Mathew teased me about my maniacal concentration and called me a mad scientist. And mad I may be, but the results were splendid: a deep red marmalade that set up firm and had the delicate berry flavor of fresh blood oranges.
All the same, returning to the original question about doubling a marmalade recipe, do I suggest you do it? No.
Unless you have a set of Paul Bunyan's pots, do not try this at home.
BIG BATCH BLOOD ORANGE MARMALADE
5 pounds blood oranges
1 pound Eureka (sour) lemons
7 cups sugar
1 cup honey
1 Since marmalade uses the fruit peel, try to work with un-sprayed, organic (or backyard) fruit if at all possible. Also note that store-bought citrus is often coated in wax to extend shelf-life, so if that's what you're using, first rinse the fruit with boiling water to remove all traces of wax, then scrub well in cold water.
2 PEEL Remove the citrus zest (the colorful and fragrant top layer of the peel) in wide strips using a vegetable peeler. Put the zest in a preserving pan with 4 cups of water, bring to a boil and simmer covered for 30 minutes while you prepare the pulp.
3 PULP First remove all the albedo, the bitter white pith beneath the zest. The technique is to take a peeled fruit and slice a round off both ends, deep enough to reveal the pulp beneath the albedo. Then stand the fruit on one of its flat ends and slice downwards along the fruit's outside edge to cut away the albedo. Work your way around the perimeter of the entire fruit until you're left with the beautiful "heart" of the fruit. (Set aside the pith for making homemade pectin "stock." Recipe to follow soon).
4 PULP, PART 2: Now slice your prepared citrus "hearts" into 1/2" rounds and chop into 1/2" cubes. Remove whatever seeds you find, but be sure to collect all the juice that puddles on your cutting board.
5 PEEL, PART 2: After 30 minutes simmering, lift the peels out of the preserving pan. (Leave the water in the pan!.) Chop zest into 1/2", confetti-like strips.
6 COOK Now put the chopped zest, pulp & pulp juices in the preserving pan with the liquid from cooking the zest. Bring it all to a modest boil and cook while stirring for about 15 minutes until the pulp has broken up and peel is translucent.
5 Stir in the sugar and honey and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Return mixture to a boil and continue reducing. When you've achieved a jell set, ladle into prepared jars, seal and process in a hot-water bath for 10 minutes for half-pint jars.
NOTE
Unless you have a super-sized preserving pan, halve the recipe to make a more manageable batch.
YIELD
about 5 pints
1 x 500 ml
4 x 8 oz
8 x 4 oz
TECHNICAL NOTES
Six pounds of fruit yielded 4 pounds fruit & peel and 2 pounds albedo. The total ingredient weight at the start of cooking was almost precisely 11 pounds; at the gell set, 7 pounds or 63.6% of its original weight. A cup of honey weighed 13 oz, confirming my suspicion that honey is at least 25% sweeter than sugar by volume. Naturally: a volume of granulated sugar, I realized, contains airspace between the grains.
Reader Comments (10)
This is the best excuse I know of for buying one of those gorgeous copper confiture kettles with the huge surface area. Some examples are http://www.cookswares.com/listbytype.asp?c=pan&t=Jam+Pot and http://spectacularlydelicious.blogspot.com/2009/10/melon-peach-pignoli-jam.html. C'mon, you know you want one...
wonderful post! the marmalade looks lovely!
may i ask if you hot water bath your preserves in the jar you show in the photo? i am trying to get away from using the typical 2 piece flat and screw tops and move toward using all glass tops. so i'm always on the look out for new options.
Hi Tigress --
thanks for the nice comment -- no i didn't process this batch in a boiling-water bath -- i thought i'd try the so called "open kettle method" instead -- which just means (as i'm sure you already know) that you sterilize the jars, scald the lids, ladle in the jam and seal it up. my grandmother never did it any other way.
most of this marmalade will be eaten pretty quickly, but i'll set aside a couple of jars for six months to learn two things: 1, if the flavor of the marmalade changes, mellows or ages over time and 2, if i have any spoilage trouble with the "open kettle" way of doing things.
i'll keep you posted, as always --
best,
keivn
Kevin, Just to be clear: does that mean that you cannot process those types of jars at all? I am assuming so. What if they were steam canned, and what are your thoughts, if any, on steam canners? Apologies for the question-packed comment, but these have been on my mind for a while, and I'm jumping at the chance to get them answered. Many thanks!
And this is certainly not an afterthought but, lord, that blood orange marmalade looks scrumptious.
Hi julia --
thanks for your comment and interesting questions.
i don't know anything about steam canners so i did a google.
this is what i came up with:
http://missvickie.com/canning/quiz.htm
scroll down to find the passage on steam canners, where this website calls them unsafe. i can't vouch for that conclusion, but this website's recommendations on other subjects seem sound, so i would give it some credence.
looks to me like you should stick with a hot-water bath.
and as for processing those bail-and-lid jars, i don't know the hard facts on that question, either. more research is needed. the general recommendation from the USDA, however, is to use only two-piece lids. so that's the recommendation i'll pass along here.
like i said in my post, i'm planning to use this marmalade soon -- especially the big bail-and-lid jar of it, so i felt it was safe to process the jars using the open-kettle method -- which, incidentally, also gets a thumbs-down from the USDA.
that's what i know --
best,
kevin
Thanks, Kevin. I do appreciate it. Steam canners are interesting; I don't have one, nor am I thinking of getting one, but I've seen strong arguments for and against them, so I was curious what your take was.
I've done the open-kettle method quite a bit and never had a problem, as have your family and I think most of Europe. As you point out, it won't take long for you to finish up that jar!
Best,
Julia
I'm curious about the timing for the last step - I'm new to canning and have found that it helps a great deal if I have a general sense of how long it takes to get things to jell set (while knowing it of course is quite variable depending on temperature, pot, etc.). About how long does it take? I'll be making the non-giant half batch!
I'm excited about this marmalade - blood oranges just went on sale at my local co-op - a clear sign that it was meant to be.
(Finally, just have to say that I love your blog. I'm a historian and enjoy the food history sprinkled through out in addition to the lovely recipes, stories, and pictures. I taught Sweetness and Power at roughly the same time you wrote a post that referred to it; I mentioned your post in class to my students as an example of how life and work intersect in amusing ways.)
Dear Parenthetical --
thank you for your nice feedback -- i especially love the convergence of "my" Sweetness and Power with "yours."
you're totally right about cooking times -- i should have given some rough guidelines and i'll be sure to do so in future recipes.
times will vary etc etc but reducing this marmalade after you add the sugar might take something like 25 to 30 minutes -- perhaps more.
i always start testing a bit before i think there will be a jell set. at 20 minutes, lets say, i'll stick a spoonful of preserve in the freezer to chill even though I know it will still be too runny. why? just to see how things are progressing, to taste (always taste everything constantly!), to try to understand better what's happening with the hot preserve.
when making jam i tend to watch the time pretty closely -- with marmalade, i just stir it and daydream and taste until it gets to where i want it to be. my experience is that citrus holds up wonderfully well to long cooking. good luck!
all the best,
kevin
ps: have you ever read John McPhee's Oranges? it's a small masterpiece. i'm rereading it now to post about it soonest --
I made this last night from oranges I picked from the trees at Heritage Square Museum in Highland Park. They have 25 navel orange trees and no one to pick them! It turned out wonderfully--not too sweet or sour. Thanks for the recipe!
Thanks very much indeed for the timing suggestions - I'll be making this tonight! (And will be sure to taste along the way.)
I haven't yet read Oranges but since I love all things McPhee I'm borrowing it from a friend posthaste.