I am not sure quite why I chose to make marmalade…. I don’t even like it!  But somehow it looked like fun.  I searched for a recipe and, instead of breaking myself gently into the world of making preserves and choose the one hour recipe, I decided to go for a Delia recipe that takes two days!  Still, I have to confess that I am really enjoying it! I am particularly looking forward to making little fabric toppers for the jars…!

I thought I’d share the process with you…

Ingredients:

1.35KG (3lb) Seville Oranges
2 Lemons
2.7KG (6lb)  Granulated Sugar – that is a lot of sugar!!

DAY 1:

Gently scrub the fruit and place it whole into a preserving pan with 5 pints (3 litres) of water and bring it to a simmer. Cover with thick foil and leave for 3 hours so that the moisture is not escaping, but the fruit is poaching gently.

After three hours, spoon the fruit into a colander and then cut the oranges in half, scraping all the contents (including pith and seeds) into a medium sized pan.  Keep the peel.  Do the same with the lemons but discard the peel.

Add 1 litre of the poaching juice to the pan and simmer for 10 minutes.  Line a sieve with muslin and place it over a bowl.  Pour the pan contents into the sieve and leave to cool and drip through.

Whilst it is all cooling, chop the orange peel into quarters and then thick strips according to how you like your marmalade. Put this back in the preserving pan.

When the muslin contents are cool, pick up the four corners of the muslin and squeeze out all of the juice as hard as you can.

Once you have got all of the juice that you can, discard the innards of the muslin.  Tip the sticky juice into the preserving pan.  Cover with a tea towel and leave overnight.