Future Marmalade

"If you'll save the peel from your mandarin oranges for me, it will come back to you as future marmalade."

Not something you hear at every staff retreat in a typical office building in downtown Seattle.

The more I cook the more I loathe food waste and the more I discover that things I've chucked into compost for years are perfectly good food. A few examples: 

• Stalks of fennel? Pickled fennel agrodolce. It keeps for at least two years with a super-simple technique and no hot-water canning! I went through a bit of fennel overload in around 2021, made a lot of batches of this Fennel Lentil Lemony Salad, and couldn't stand the thought of throwing out all those stalks that also taste of licorice. I still have a couple of jars of agrodolce. I use them in pasta sauces and soups.
• Fennel fronds? Fennel fronds pesto. Great on pasta.
• Cauliflower leaves? Roast them right along with the rest of the cauliflower, crisp them up separately as a crunchy chip, or throw them in the food processor with everything else you're turning into cauliflower rice or a great vegan broccoli-cauliflower soup.
• Broccoli leaves? Chop them up right along with the rest of the broccoli (I've been using the stems in all my broccoli recipes for years and years--peel if super tough, dice) for the outstanding vegan broccoli-red grape salad from Hummusapien's appropriately named Best Broccoli Salad Ever Recipe. Or they could go into the oven with the cauliflower leaves if you're doing a batch of something that involves both and you'll have mixed chips.

So, yeah, future marmalade. In some chat thread I ran across someone saying how much they hate food waste and that they save all their orange peels and then make marmalade. Last year I made a batch of mixed citrus ginger marmalade that I loved (first marmalade ever). Why not plan ahead for future marmalade?

All those lemon wedge garnishes on the side of a glass of Arnold Palmer (half and half if you're in the South), orange slices adorning a plated restaurant meal, bit of lime from some cocktail...I brought them home (learned to carry a plastic bag in all my backpacks and panniers), did the work of getting rid of the bitter white pith and slicing into thin strands, and put them in the bag in the freezer labeled Future Marmalade. 

If I had some mandarins that were starting to head toward soft? Into the bag, segments and prepped peel both. Lemons ditto? Ditto. Turns out I'm not very good at using up citrus fruit quickly so it's a good thing I discovered this food-saving trick.

The beauty of this approach is that making marmalade now means I start with the vast majority of the prep work done in little five-minute increments instead of facing a morning of peeling, slicing, dealing with pith, segmenting (I'm not very practiced at supreming, a term I learned reading marmalade recipes). I did want to make sure I had enough flesh to balance the peel so I bought a couple of big ruby red grapefruit (a citrus not yet represented in the Future Marmalade bag), an orange and a lemon and prepped those.

Another time-saving labor-distributing step: Tender peels are essential to good marmalade. Most recipes call for a long, slow cooking phase for the peels in water alone. One of the recipes suggested prepping the peel and soaking it overnight for a big head start on the softening stage. Perfect. I got that put together, including the bundle of pith and seeds from the fresh fruit in cheesecloth that will release pectin needed for this all to set up, and let water and time work their magic.

One more thing that can save some work: Fresh ginger paste in a tube! I've had so many chunks of ginger root either go bad in the produce drawer or shrivel up in the freezer wrapped in foil. I'd agree that fresh ginger you grate yourself is wonderful, but if that's the step keeping you from using fresh ginger in a recipe I say go for the tube. They sell cilantro in a tube, too, and that's another item I've had to put in the compost heap occasionally because I didn't use it fast enough and also didn't get around to chopping and freezing it to save for future salsa. Life, time, and food prep labor do not always align neatly.

I went back to the original mixed citrus ginger marmalade recipe and read a few more for good measure. The ratios of fruit weight to water and sugar varied a bit across recipes from 1.5 to 2 times the fruit weight. Searching for information I found another would-be marmalade maker on Reddit asking why the fruit/sugar/water ratios vary so much and getting some helpful answers. I knew it would depend on how much sweetness I have from the actual fruit. Given that I have a lot more peel than fruit, that was going to push toward more sugar.

When I read recipes I read a lot of them as well as the comments to check for what others learned following it. In any of the preserves or jams I'm looking in particular at the proportion of main ingredient to other ingredients. All of this helps me develop the tweaks I'm likely going to make. 

For this batch I was planning to pick up the idea of using both fresh and crystallized ginger from My Darling Lemon Thyme. I almost went for the fresh chili addition from Lembit Lounge Cuisine but I'm making a lot of chutneys this year and some tomato jam that involves pepper seasonings so I decided against that. I want some variety in the spicing of my various preserves. I would leap at the cloves and cinnamon used in Recipes by Hosheen but again, chutneys, and I also have a tendency to over-season things so I should have a few items that have clean, fresh flavors that stand alone.

Resourcefully Sourced Multi-Citrus Ginger Marmalade

Flesh of mixed citrus fruits with their juice: 4 cups

Peel of mixed citrus fruits: Started with ~3 pounds, or a one-gallon bag full plus a one-quart bag full (although this included some of the flesh accounted for above). After cooking this turned out to be nearly 8 cups of peel. I decided I didn't want twice as much peel as fruit--that seemed like I'd be overdoing it. I stirred it in a cup at a time until it looked about right and reserved 3 cups of the peel for other uses, thinking I'll throw them into a chutney or have a head start on a future batch of marmalade.

Ginger paste: 5 T. I started with 2 T. based on Garden Betty's recipe with 2 T. ginger to 4 c. fruit, tasted at the end after stirring in the peel and kept adjusting up.

Crystallized ginger: Whoops! That was on the kitchen island behind my primary work zone thanks to my sweetheart's grocery run by bike to get this for me along with other ingredients I need for future recipes. Totally forgot to chop and add it. That's what happens when you're synthesizing multiple recipes and hopscotching from one browser tab to another. 

No wonder I had to keep increasing the ginger paste. Crystallized ginger would have been Just The Thing to take this across the line into AmazeBalls Territory. You know what this means--I have to make another batch pretty soon.

White granulated sugar: 5 c.; I wanted to be sure I offset the potential bitterness created by having such a high peel-to-fruit ratio. One of the recipes I looked at actually used half as much sugar as fruit; I could have started there, but the sugar really is part of the setting-up chemical reaction and I had my doubts.

Actual cooking process

In my 6.5 quart Dutch oven I covered the peel with water and left it to soak overnight. To start the cooking process I added a bit more water since absorbing water overnight meant it wasn't all under water. I boiled it for an hour, stirring every so often and testing the peel until it was very tender. When I drained the peel I had 2-1/2 cups of very citrusy water.

Following the instructions from the majority of the recipes I checked, I put the citrusy water, flesh and juice, sugar, ginger, and packet of pectinizing pith and seeds into the pot. I brought that to a rapid boil and kept it boiling, stirring every so often and smooshing down on the cheesecloth-wrapped packet to push pectin out of it and into the pot. 

Checking the temperature worked better when I let it come to a full boil and stay there rather than stirring it down and introducing cooler air. I cooked it for over 30 minutes and got it north of 210 degrees, maybe around 214 degrees. Not quite the 220 degrees every recipe said to get to but y'know, after a while you just want to be done.

Yield: 6 half-pints and 6 quarter-pints, or 4-1/2 cups of delicious product all told

Citrus Marmalade Recipes for Reference

• Citrus Marmalade, National Center for Home Food Preservation (always a trusted resource for canning instructions so read it even if you make another version; note that they cook peel and flesh together and this won't tenderize the peel as much as a precooking step will)
• Three-Citrus Ginger Marmalade, My Darling Lemon Thyme (uses both fresh and crystallized ginger)
• Orange-Grapefruit-Ginger Marmalade, Garden Betty (the one I followed last year)
• Meyer Lemon and Fresh Ginger Marmalade, Suwannee Rose (the source of the overnight soaking inspiration)
• Meyer Lemon, Orange and Fresh Ginger Marmalade, The Café Sucre Farine (uses commercial pectin, discards the pith and seeds instead of using them for their pectin value; also has you microwave the flesh and peel and let suit for several hours to dissolve the sugar and this technique was too different for me to want to try it)
• Spiced Citrus Ginger Marmalade, Recipes by Hosheen (adds clove and cinnamon to the ginger, which sounds pretty delicious)
• Citrus Ginger and Chili Marmalade, Lembit Lounge Cuisine (adding a fresh chili is an interesting twist)
• Three-Citrus Marmalade, Food in Jars (no ginger, but she said in a tomato jam recipe that as long as you get the proportions right for the main ingredient, acid and sugar, you can adjust the seasonings/spices)
• Orange-Ginger Marmalade, Food in Jars (one of her older recipes; uses a very different technique of just chopping up oranges, peel and all)
• Traditional Seville Orange Marmalade, Delia Smith (good for highly detailed step-by-step instructions)
• The 10 Golden Rules for Marmalade Making , Good Housekeeping (my mom subscribed to GH for years and years and I have a warm spot in my heart for them; these also seem like good tips)
• How to Make Perfect Orange Marmalade, The Guardian (reviews three different approaches)
• How to Make Amazing Orange Marmalade with Frozen Fruit, Food Talk Daily (a UK source so it doesn't describe the canning step; saving this link in case you or I need it someday because we got tired of doing the peeling and threw whole fruit into the freezer, although working with softened peel to cut it into strips sounds slippery and possibly hazardous to me; recipe also works with fresh fruit)
• Citrus Marmalade, Alison Roman