Four Fruit Marmalade without Pectin

It’s citrus season and since I can never make up my mind what fruit to get – and not get, I get a few of each and make a multi fruit marmalade. This year it was Four Fruit Marmalade. I used grapefruit, oranges, blood oranges and meyer lemons.

It is dee-licious.

You should make some.

Four Fruit Marmalade

2 grapefruit, sectioned. Zest one of them.
2 oranges, zested and sectioned.
2 blood oranges, zested and sectioned.
4 meyer lemons, zested and sectioned.
7 cups of sugar
1/2 tsp salt (to cut the bitter)

Do your zesting first. Put the zest in a pot with 3 cups of water, bring it to a boil and let it boil happily until you have all the sectioning done.

I use a serrated grapefruit spoon for the sectioning. Just cut the fruit in half and go at it. Pull the seeds out as you find them.

I sectioned all the fruit into a bowl. Between the fruit in the bowl and the liquid in the zest pot, there were roughly 7 cups of stuff. That’s why the 7 cups of sugar. If you make a smaller batch, just remember that you want about the same amount of sugar as you have fruit stuff.

Put all the fruit stuff and the zest stuff in a good pot with a wide bottom. Add the sugar and salt. Bring it all to a boil. There’s no pectin in this recipe, so you’re going to have to boil it down until the gelling point – 220 degrees here in Indiana. At higher altitudes, the gelling point is lower.

Let it boil hard. Mine boiled until the foam started creeping up the sides of the pan. That’s normal. You might stir it once in a while to make sure it’s not sticking.

When you reach the gelling temp, turn off the heat, ladle into jars, put the lids on and process 10 minutes for canning if you’re going to store it for a while.

Note: If you use a pot that’s too small, the jam will start to brown before it reaches the gelling point. The sugars will caramelize before enough liquid boils out so start out with a good big pot. It’s OK if your jam is way down in there because the pot seems too big. It isn’t too big. It’s efficient. Efficient is good.

Print the recipe or save it to your recipe box: Four Fruit Marmalade with No Pectin

Robin from Rurification blogs at Rurification.

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