Onion Marmalade

How do you make your house smell like onions for a week?

Make onion marmalade of course!

Last week I travelled up to sunny Yamba for a wedding.  It was great to take some time off to relax, and the weather was beautiful.  We decided to try out a new cafe that had recently opened up in Yamba called Irons and Craig.  The food was delicious and I particularly liked a dish which featured mushrooms with feta on sourdough toast. The dish also had some onion marmalade on the side.  The onion marmalade was sweet and caramalised and went pefectly with the mushrooms.

So all throughout September I have been tied to a pedometer, measuring the steps that I take each day.  I was part of a team for Steptember, a charity raising money for the Cerebral Palsy Alliance.  The goal was to take 10,000 steps a day and raise $500 as a team.  The average office worker only takes 2,500 steps a day, so this goal is more challenging than it sounds.

To raise money we decided to have a cake and preserves sale.  One of my colleagues made some delicious chutneys, and there was plenty of cake to be sold.  I decided to make onion marmalade after tasting the delicious version in Yamba.

Even though it's called 'marmalade', it's more like a jam, given that there's no citrus peel.  You might think that three kilos of onions is a lot, but it actually only makes 5 decent jars.  A lot of the recipes of onion marmalade online call for the onions to be really caramelised, until dark brown, and contain ingredients like red wine or balsamic vinegar to make the colour a deep red.  The one I had at Irons and Craig was more of a light brown colour, and the onions were transluscent, which meant that the preserve wasn't overly sweet or rich.  To replicate this, rather than using red wine and balsamic, I used chardonnay and apple cider vinegar (and a little bit of port).

The Chardonnay I used was the Green Jade Chardonnay from a winery called Gemtree from McLaren Vale.  Interestingly, it's an organic winery.  The Chardonnay was a younger, light, unwooded one, so it imparted a lighter flavour into the marmalade.

I had some thyme lying around after cooking a chicken dish earlier in the week, so I added it into the mix too, along with pepper and nutmeg.

In all my eagerness to sell all of the jars, I didn't actually get to use it myself!  But I received a 'testimonial' from a colleague who said it's really good on a toasted cheese sandwich, or with barbecued meat!

...And my house still smelt like onions, until I made garlic prawns over the weekend... Now it reeks of garlic.


Onion Marmalade Recipe

What you need:

• 3 kg onions, sliced thinly;
• 2 1/4 cups of white sugar;
• 3 cups of white wine (I used Chardonnay);
• 1 cup of apple cider vinegar;
• 1/4 cup of port;
• 1 tablespoon of white pepper;
• 2 teaspoons of cracked black pepper;
• a good handful of thyme, leaves picked;
• 1 tablespoon of sea salt;
• 1 teaspoon of nutmeg;
• 1 tablespoon of Keen's mustard powder;
• Olive oil

Making the marmalade:

1. Heat a splash of olive oil in the bottom of a large pot and add in the onions.  You might need to do this in parts, adding more raw onions as the ones in the pot sweat down.
2. Once all of the onions have softened significantly but have not browned or caramalised (will take around 30 mins), add in the white wine, the vinegar and the port and bring to the boil.
3. Add in the pepper, herbs and spices and simmer for 45-60 mins, or until the liquid has become a syrup and you’re pretty much left with a sticky, jam-like consistency.

Rangpur "Lime" and Jasmine Tea Marmalade

On the same weekend that I was down in Canberra making Pickled Golden Beetroot, I also managed to bring back some fresh produce, mostly from my girlfriend's parents' garden where they grow heaps of fruit and vegetables. But also from next door...

My girlfriend's dad mentioned that the next-door neighbours had a large lime tree that was going a bit mental with fruit.  Being Canberra, neighbours are much more friendly than the ones near my place in the inner city (who tend to not have enough space on their tiny balconies to grow enormous lime trees).  Apparently, the neigbours weren't using the limes and were more than happy for us to use them so we went next door to pick  a few.  But I didn't end up with just a few...  I ended up with close to three kilos!

These limes were intriguing.  They had orange skin rather than green.  They had a similar fragrance to standard limes, but the pulp inside looked more like that of an orange.   And they tasted like sour mandarins.  Were these really limes?  My girlfriend's dad must have seen a puzzled look on my face and assured me that they were.  In the absence of any other information, I took his word for it and brought my haul of "limes" back to Sydney.

Back in Sydney, I did some digging on the internet and found out that the unknown fruit were actually Rangpur "Limes".  They aren't actually limes but are pretty much a hybrid of lemon and mandarin that can be used as a lime substitute.  Interestingly, they're named after a Bangladeshi city.

I flicked through recipe books and searched the internet to see what I could do with the Rangpurs.  Marmalade was the most obvious choice, and given the nice smell of the zest, I was pretty sure it would  make a decent one.

When I researched marmalade recipes, I decided to refer to a book I'd recently bought.  Saving the Season by Kevin West is one of the best books about preserving I've seen.  After reading an article about West in the Lucky Peach magazine and I was pretty keen to track down his book, so I shipped it in from the UK.  It has some really interesting recipes and some detailed explanations on the basics of making jams, marmalades, pickles and other preserves.  The book is easy to read and eloquently written, and has some beautiful pictures too.

West has several different recipes for Marmalade.  The one that inspired my recipe was for 'Fine-Shred Lime or Lemon Marmalade'.   The recipe runs over a three day period and is quite time consuming, but it's geared towards limes which have a lot of pectin, which helps the marmalade set.  I hoped that it would translate to the Rangpurs.

I also thought it would be nice to add something else to enhance the flavour.  I'd been to an awesome Chinese restaurant earlier in the week and had been drinking Jasmine Tea, which for some reason tasted better than usual - it was really fragrant and delicious.

Having also seen combinations with citrus and Earl Grey tea which really worked, I decided to experiment with the Jasmine Tea + Rangpur combination.   Luckily, I also had some really good quality tea in my pantry that I had brought back from a trip to Vietnam.  The tea is from the Sofitel Metropole Legend Hanoi, which is a really cool hotel, housed in an old colonial French building.

The marmalade making also coincided with a bake sale at work to raise money for a charity.  My boss had the idea that instead of baking cake, I could bring in some jars of the preserves I'd been making.  And given the harvest of Rangpurs I'd brought back from Canberra, I figured it was a perfect opportunity raise money via marmalade.  However, this just made me a bit worried that the end result wouldn't be any good - instead of selling Rangpurs, I'd just be selling lemons.

When compared with the Kumquat marmalade I made a couple of weeks ago, I think this marmalade recipe has room for improvement.  Rangpurs are quite tart and they give the marmalade a bitter aftertaste.  I'm also not sure the tea really added much to the end result, other than a slight floral note.  But I'm really not the best judge of marmalade, especially given that I only rarely eat it.  When I do, I tend to enjoy it, but I'm not a marmalade fanatic like some people I know.

The marmalade-lovers who tried my recipe all seemed to give it a thumbs up (however, these "marmalade-lovers" also happened to be some of my friends, so maybe they were holding back their harsh, career-ending comments - that's what friends are meant to do... right?).  One criticism I received was that it was slightly crystalised and not globbular enough.  Originally when I made the jam, I used the cold saucer test to work out whether it was ready and I thought it had reached the setting point.  I was totally wrong.  The marmalade didn't set on the first attempt and it was still quite wobbly and runny in the jars.  The next day I had to scrape the marmalade out of each of the jars and then wash and sterilise them all again (took ages because I'd made so much) and then reduce it in a pan for an additional five or ten minutes. This probably resulted in the crystallisation.  It's also a pretty fruit heavy and chunky jam, which adds to the thicker texture.

Rangpur and Jasmine Tea Marmalade

Adapted from Kevin West's Fine-Shred Lime or Lemon Marmalade Recipe in Saving the Season

What you need:

• 1kg of Rangpurs (make sure you rinse any wax off the fruit in hot water if you purchased the fruit from a fruit shop or supermarket);
• 10 cups of water;
• 1.5kg of caster sugar;
• 3 tablespoons of Jasmine Tea or three Jasmine Tea bags; and
• Muslin cloth and twine.

Making the Marmalade:

1.  The first step is the most time consuming and finicky.  Peel the zest off the fruit in strips.  Once you have peeled all of the fruit, stack the zest strips and slice finely with a sharp knife (see photos above).

2.  Next, slice the remaining fruit into thin circles (see below).  As you go, pick the seeds out of the pulp and put them aside.

3.  Put all the seeds that you removed into a muslin cloth bag and tie tightly with twine.

4.  Place the sliced zest, the fruit circles and the seed bag into a large container and cover with the 10 cups of water.  Leave this overnight to soak.

5.  The next day, transfer the zest, fruit, seed bag and the liquid into a pot.  Bring the pot to the boil and then gently simmer the fruit and water for around 20 minutes.  Then allow the mixture to cool, transfer it back into the container and then leave it to soak overnight again.  

6.  On the third and final day, warm the sugar on a baking tray in an oven, preheated to 110 degrees celsius, for 15 minutes.  

7.  All of the white pith should have now disintegrated after the soaking, but put some gloves on and then use your hands to break up any remaining pith.  

8.  Put the Jasmine Tea into square of muslin cloth and tie it up tightly (if you're not using tea bags).

9.  Pour the fruit and liquid into a pot, along with the tea and the seed bag, and bring to the boil.

10.  Once it has reached the boil, add the sugar into the pot.  Skim off any white froth that bubbles up to the top.  

11.  Reduce the mixture on a high heat (preferably around 104 degrees celsius if you have a thermometer) until the marmalade gets to a "jam-like consistency".

12.  You can test the consistency using the cold-saucer test.

13.  When it's ready, turn off the heat, allow the marmalade to cool for a few minutes and then pour it into sterilised jars.   If using preserving jars, you can seal the jars by canning them in a water bath for ten minutes.

  

Kumquat Marmalade

My parents have two large kumquat trees in their backyard.  Some years they don't produce much fruit but this year they've been particularly prolific.

Whenever I visit them, my Mum offloads bags filled to the brim with kumquats.  So week after week, my fruit bowl at home seems to pile up higher and higher with kumquats.  My Mum calls kumquats 'Calamansi', which is the Filipino word for the fruit. In the Philippines they tend to squeeze them over savoury dishes instead of using a lemon or a lime.  At the Sydney Filipino restaurant, La Mesa, they even serve Calamansi juice as a sharp and refreshing drink.

Sometimes I also squeeze kumquats into a gin and tonic.  But a man can only drink so many G&Ts.

So I had to find a way to use these kumquats.  The most obvious solution was marmalade.  The difference between a marmalade and a jam is that a marmalade includes both the skin/rind along with the juice and pulp of the fruit.  It is more time consuming than a jam because you need to cook the marmalade down to a point where the rind becomes soft enough to eat.  Some recipes also ask you to soak the fruit in order to remove some of the bitterness from the pith.

Muslin cloth for the seeds

The good thing about kumquats is that they are tiny and their rind is very thin.  So it's less time consuming than, say, orange marmalade.

My kumquat marmalade turned out particularly well (I only made a small quantity, but should've made more!) It's very fragrant - kumquat rind is more floral and perfumed in taste than other citrus, and it really comes through.  It's also pretty tart, and ends on a bitter note - but reading other blogs and books about marmalade, it seems that for some people the bitterness is part of the appeal of marmalade.

This week I also made a Rangpur Lime Marmalade with Jasmine Tea.  I wasn't as pleased with this batch, but I'll post about it later this week!

Kumquat Marmalade Recipe

What you need:

• 2 sterilised half pint jars;
• 500g of kumquats;
• 500g of sugar;
• 500ml of water; and
• Muslin cloth.

Making the marmalade:

1. This recipe is very flexible.  As with most jam recipes, you need the same weight in sugar that you have in fruit, and then a comparable volume of water.  
2. The first step is the most time consuming step.  You need to slice all of the kumquats into thin circles, while saving all of the seeds/pips.  I did this by firstly slicing the stem off and discarding;  then squeezing out the juice into a pot while catching the pips as they popped out of the fruit.  It's pretty fiddly as you could imagine (partly the reason why I made a small batch!)  You should end up with lots of slices of kumquat rind, steeping in the kumquat juice.  Some recipes say you don't need to slice the kumquats up and simply cut them in half, but I prefer my marmalade to be less chunky.
3. Put all of the seeds that you just extracted from the fruit into a muslin cloth and then tie the cloth up so the seeds are secure.
4. Add the water and the cloth bag to the kumquat rind and juice and bring the pot to the boil.  Simmer for around half an hour or until the rind is soft.  You should be able to break the rind up between your fingers.
5. Now, add in the sugar, stir the marmalade until it dissolves and then bring the pot to the boil again.  Simmer without the lid on for another half hour.
6. To test whether your marmalade is ready, place a saucer into your freezer and let it chill for about five minutes.  You can then place a teaspoon of the marmalade onto the cold saucer and then put it in the freezer again for a minute.  When you remove the saucer the marmalade should have thickened to a point where a jelly-like skin has formed and if you tilt the saucer vertically, the marmalade doesn't run very quickly and pretty much sticks to the saucer.  If it's still watery, it's definitely not done.  Determining whether a marmalade/jam is ready is actually quite challenging, and I'd say that with experience, this will become easier for me.  
7. When it's done, scoop the marmalade into the jars and allow to cool.