So last week, I spotted a recipe for a small batch of blood orange marmalade on the LA Times website and thought it would be fun to try so I picked up some blood oranges at the local farmers' market.
Before I get into that, I thought I'd mention that Marisa of the Food In Jars blog, is hosting a preserving skills mastery challenge for 2017 featuring a different skill each month. January was marmalade and I thought the fun part was the round-up she's publishing at the end of the month, sharing some of the submissions from participants. Fun to see what people come up with. Here's a link to the marmalade round-up.
My fridge is suffering from condiment over-population at the moment but I think I will participate in the challenge anyway as a way to try some new things. February is Salt Preserving. I've still got plenty of preserved lemons in the fridge but I should put up a jar of limes since my tree is absolutely loaded.
Back to the blood oranges. The LA Times recipe has you remove the zest with a peeler and slice it into fine shreds, then cut off all the pith and basically supreme the fruits. My oranges were small and I was disturbed by the amount of flesh I was losing in the process of removing all the pith - they were just about golf ball-size once I removed the zest and pith. Christine Ferber has a recipe that uses just the zest and juice but it depends on making a green apple pectin, something I didn't feel like doing. Then I remembered that I had good success with the quick Instant Pot marmalade that sliced the whole fruits with a mandoline so I switched to that method. I'm sure I could have gotten a more refined, sweeter and less bitter result from the first process but I'm happy with this. It's fairly bitter and I decided to play that up by adding a shot of Campari just before it reached the set point.
Blood Orange-Campari Marmalade:
Edited to add: The Instant Pot recipe I linked to calls for a 2X ratio of sugar to fruit for lemon or lime and suggests less for oranges. I started out with 1X and added a bit more after tasting so the final was 1.33X.
Along with the Campari, I also added about 1.5 oz of lime juice and a pinch of salt to balance the dominant sweet-bitter thing.
600 g fruit/zest from 9 small blood oranges
800 g sugar
1.5 oz lime juice
1.5 oz Campari
pinch salt
