Marmalade is made of bitter "Sevilla" oranges, yes, the 🍊🌳🍊🌳 I planted: https://jansenendewaal.blogspot.com/2020/03/blog-post.html
Regular oranges are too sweet, and you cannot get the white pith out very well. Mr. Habets uses 1.5 kg oranges, 3 kg sugar, 4 liters water for 2 liters of marmalade. mrs. Pazzaglia 1 kg lemons and 2 kg sugar, to give you an idea of ratios. Not a lot of fruit, actually! And yes a lot of water. Too much, I think.
Regular oranges are too sweet, and you cannot get the white pith out very well. Mr. Habets uses 1.5 kg oranges, 3 kg sugar, 4 liters water for 2 liters of marmalade. mrs. Pazzaglia 1 kg lemons and 2 kg sugar, to give you an idea of ratios. Not a lot of fruit, actually! And yes a lot of water. Too much, I think.
Batch one
The oranges are sliced in two, juice extracted with a citrus juicer. Then the pips and pith are scraped out with a spoon. That is far easier than with regular oranges, actually.
The remaining orange rind needs to be cut up in thin slices, or however chunky you want them to be. I started with one peel at a time, but that takes too much time. Just stack the peels and slice.
Now the cut rinds are cooked in the juice and 2 liters of water, about two hours. Hm, this calls for a pressure cooker.
The pips and pith are cooked along in a muslin cloth to extract (bitter) flavor and pectin. In the end you squeeze the cloth to extract all pectine etc. Well, that did not really work well. So I ended up cooking the pith and pips in a separate pan, and just sieving the result in a regular sieve to obtain the pectin.
After the rinds are cooked and are soft you add the pectin you made, and the sugar. Dissolve, and boil a while. Put into sterilized jars with a jam funnel, to keep the edges of the jars clean. After about an hour hold the pots upside down to evenly distribute the peels.
All very well, but apparently I did not obtain enough pectin with this cloth method, the marmalade did not set and stayed sort of liquid. Squeezing the ball did not yield more pectin. Just sieving with a regular sieve neither. Ended up making an extra batch of pectin with 3 oranges and two lemons. Re-boiled the marmalade with that: still did not set well. Bought a packet of citrus pectin, reboiled again. That worked well.
Add the pectin powder to the cold jam mix, and stir in with a whisk, else you will immediately have pectin lumps, that will only dissolve by cooking really well.
Habets uses 4 liter of water to obtain 2 liters of marmalade, boiling it a long time and evaporating the water. That is a waste of energy. We can do with far less water. 2.5-3 liters max.
Batch two: Pressure cooker
The second batch of marmalade was made using the pressure cooker. The whole idea of making marmalade is to first soften the rinds, obtain pectin, and only then add sugar and boil to make the marmalade set. So you can very well cook the peels separately in the pressure cooker, 10 minutes instead of two hours. (I did 40 mins at high pressure, as 2 hours :3 is about 40 mins. That is too long. 10-15 mins probably is right.) Pectin you can make with the pith and the pips in a small separate pan, in about half an hour. Just sieve with a regular sieve, cloth is not necessary. Put cooked liquid with rinds and pectin (+ bought pectin?) in a big pot, add the sugar, and boil.
Put into sterilized jars with jam funnel to keep the rims clean. (Jam on the rims is a way for bacteria to enter the jar.)
Habets says to let cool the boiled mixture for 15 mins, else the peels will float to the top of the jar. It needs cooling far longer than 15 minutes, and I want the jam to be in the jars as hot as possible, so I hold the jars upside down about an hour later, to evenly distribute the peels.
