Marmalade time

Once again, that dratted Seville orange tree to the south of the house has produced an astonishing number of the sourest oranges imaginable. One branch had so many oranges on it that it collapsed and broke (yay!). We’ll cut it off to reduce the tree’s suffering. Shown here are some of the rinds that have had their juice removed and were boiled to soften them.

Karla is removing the remaining pulp from the rinds. Then using scissors, a knife, and finally a Cuisinart the rinds were chopped into tiny pieces. A chef we know says she makes marmalade by tossing whole oranges into her Cuisinart! Blasphemy! Seeds! We are so pure by taking the time to do all of our hand labor.
Here are orange juice, cut up rinds, a ghastly amount of cane sugar, and a bunch of sterilized jars ready to receive the final concoction boiling in the big pot. Whether the final product will jell and become real jam is iffy. Supposedly oranges contain enough pectin to self-jell. But our main problem with this whole venture is that we try to make too large a batch at once. When you try to balance the amount of juice with the amount of rinds and sugar, mistakes can be made. We picked maybe one-eighth of the oranges on the tree which comes to about ten gallons (38 liters) of oranges. Nobody has a stove big enough to cook up ten gallons of marmalade! Even with the burner turned to its highest setting, our commercial stove took over a half hour to bring only half a batch up to boiling, and that’s with the whole pot pre-heated for another half hour on our wood stove!

Every time we do this marathon of marmalade, we swear that we’ll never do it again. Then we do it again. Must be the definition of insanity, or weak resolve.