Medium-cut blood orange marmalade, June Taylor-inspired (plus a collection of Taylor’s recipes)

The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love’s nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love’s fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.
– Jeanette Winterson, ‘The Powerbook’

Sometimes you do absurd things for love.

What I give you here is not so much a recipe but a guide. This makes the blood orange marmalade of my dreams.

Fragrant, assertive peel unencumbered by pith. Gently bittersweet, softer and more voluptuous than Seville orange marmalade. Just enough to sugar enhance, complicate and set the preserve. The pulp retains some of its integrity and gives body, tiny bursts of soft fruit in an intense citrus jelly. A rich, bright, true blood orange flavour, exactly as you’d hope if you concentrated 5 oranges into a single jam jar.

And it glows like a ruby on the spoon.

There’s a price: this is possibly the most fussy marmalade recipe you’ll see. Lots of knife work. But I make it that way because it’s how I like it.

Marmalade is a very personal thing; this exact recipe is not for you if you prefer to slice up and use the whole orange, but you might still find this approach to marmalade making interesting. Fruit is always a bit different from batch to batch–different sizes, levels of sugar, peel thicknesses, pectin and moisture content–so it makes sense to have an adaptable formula.

I have a deep admiration for people who have exacting methods driven by refined taste and aesthetics, deeper still for people who help others realise their own tastes and how to achieve what they want.

June Taylor, a professional preserve-maker and a Brit transplanted to the Bay Area, is one such figure. I found her while looking up how low sugar preserves worked. Learning about her approach was a revelation: sugar is a tool, not as a crutch,  just enough is added to enhance the fruit. Her preserves contain as little as 15% added sugar and are just sweet, soft-set preserves. They’re made that way because of decades of taste: it’s what she likes.

I’ll probably never taste her work, but just knowing about her ideas have changed the way I look at preserves. I’ve adapted her ideas to suit my own tastes and lifestyle, and felt it would be helpful present a list of resources in case anyone else is interested in June Taylor’s approach to preserves.

 

Further reading and watching: June Taylor recipes and interviews

Considering Taylor’s approach, finding written-down recipes is unsurprisingly pretty tricky. Most are more or less directly from Taylor, while the peach preserve is from a person who took one of her preserve workshops.

Reading Taylor’s thoughts and watching her talk about and make preserves is very helpful. You get to understand her ideas and processes. I appreciate that transparency.

• Thick cut orange marmalade, tangerine & grapefruit marmalade (December 2003)
• Poached blood oranges in clementine ratafia, grapefruit-and-Meyer-lemon marmalade (February 2005)
• June Taylor Jams {video} (July 2008)
• Obsessives: Marmalade {video} (August 2008)
• Making marmalade with June Taylor (February 2010)
• Perfectly simple peach preserves (September 2010)
• June Taylor Jams: A Portrait {video} (2011)
• June Taylor’s way with fruit: esoteric, steeped in history (January 2011)
• Candied Meyer lemon peel (February 2011)
• Jam Profile: June Taylor (March 2012)
• Apricots in almond syrup, Santa Rosa plum conserve, thick cut orange marmalade in The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors, and Recipes by Corby Cummer (October 2013), pp 161 – 164 (Google Books preview here)
• Pear and vanilla butter (November 2013) – make this if you still have pears hanging around! Easy and lovely.

Blood orange marmalade with yoghurt

 

MEDIUM-CUT BLOOD ORANGE MARMALADE,  SMALL BATCH
Makes about 600ml, or enough to fill 2 x 340g/12 0z jar. Personally, I cool and stick it in the fridge in tupperware.
Based on June Taylor’s thick-cut orange marmalade, with great instruction from Shuna Fish Lydon

If you get bored of supreming oranges, juice the rest, but I’d recommend having some flesh to add body.

Seeing how the mixture wrinkles on a chilled plate and how it falls from the spoon is really best test here;  the amount is too scanty for a thermometer, though I did try.

ingredients

1.6kg well-scrubbed blood oranges, about 10 medium (this makes ~1.2kg prepared weight of peel & flesh)
6 tablespoons lemon juice, from about 2 smallish lemons; retain the squeezed lemon shells
475g – 725g white granulated sugar (depends on the sourness of the fruit and the weight of the prepared peel and flesh; read the method)

equipment
A small, sharp knife is important here, plus a square of muslin or  jelly bag. And jam jars, obviously.

instructions

cut the peel & prepare blood oranges (this takes 1 – 2 hours, so plan accordingly):

1. Thinly pare off skin from around half the oranges (a vegetable peeler may be helpful). Cut into 7 – 10 mm thick strips. Set the cut peel aside.
2. Supreme the rest of the oranges: top and tail enough to see the flesh, then stand on one flat end and cut, following the curve of the orange from top to bottom. Remove as much white pith as possible. Cut in-between the orange segments, carefully separating the naked flesh from the membrane. Reserve any pips.
3. Add pips and membranes to a muslin or jelly bag. Discard the thick white pith and uncut peel (or candy the latter).

calculate sugar and lemon juice:

1. Important: Now weigh the cut peel, flesh, and juice together (keep the first two in separate piles though).
2. Note down their total weight and calculate 40% – 60% of this figure. This is the range of the sugar you’ll add in grams.
3. You will need about 2 – 3 tablespoons (30 – 45 ml) lemon juice per 500g. The lower range is the minimum needed to help the marmalade set; add more according to taste.

macerate orange flesh & finish pectin bag:

1. Put orange flesh and juice into a bowl. Add lemon juice to the flesh, retaining the lemon seeds.
2. Sprinkle the minimum amount of sugar over the orange flesh and gently stir. Leave to sit. This helps firm up the pulp for more body.
3. Roughly chop the lemon shells and add both these and the lemon seeds to the bag of orange membranes and seeds. Tie bag roomily, but with a tight knot. This is your pectin bag.

simmer the peel:

1. Put the cut peel and the pectin bag into a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Just barely cover the peel with water. Do this by eye and feel: you want it to move bulkily,  not too much swishing around. Gradually bring this mixture to a gentle yet insistent simmer.
2. Let it bubble uncovered for 15 – 25 minutes, checking in every so often. Taste the peel: it’s ready when it’s just tender to the tooth. Remove pot from heat.

* At this stage, you may want to start sterilising jars and lids and put some saucers in the freezer.

harvest the pectin:

1. Remove the pectin bag from the peel pot, cool for about 10 – 15 minutes.
2. Put on a pair of clean rubber gloves and squeeze the creamy pectin from the bag. Squeeze and scrape as much pectin as possible from the bag and your hands into the pan: this is what makes it set.
3. Stir to dissolve. Discard pectin bag.

finally, boil the lot:

1. Add the orange flesh and all the juice into the peel and pectin pan. Heat gently, stirring. Once sugar has completely dissolved, taste. If needed, add enough sugar so it’s just a notch sweeter than you’d like the final marmalade to be. Stir to dissolve.
2. Increase heat to medium and let the mixture simmer for 25 – 35 minutes, stirring occasionally. Skim just the most obviously opaque scum off the surface at the beginning. This mixture will pretty much reduce by half.
3. Start testing for set once the jam darkens slightly and lazy bubbles appear on the surface. Take jam off the heat, drop a little blob on a chilled saucer, let sit for 2 minutes. It should hold a rounded shape and wrinkle when you push your finger through. Continue to simmer, testing every few minutes, til a set is reached.
4. Once ready, take pan off heat. Working quickly one jar at a time, set a hot sterilised jar on a towel-lined surface and ladle/funnel in the jam. Leave 5mm headspace for screw-tops and 1 cm for clip-tops. Seal and leave to cool completely.