Oh, My Darling…Clementine Marmalade

Last weekend we amused ourselves once again by making another dish in tandem with Haalo in Australia! She made a gorgeous Blood Orange Marmalade, and we made marmalade with clementines. We decided to post ours a little later because we wanted to fiddle with the ingredients. A week later, and we’re still not quite satisfied with the recipe, so we’ll just talk about it in general terms.

Marmalades are, in essence, only made of three things: fruit. Sugar. Water. Most recipes call for the about five cups of juice and five cups of sugar. If you can’t get that from the clementines you have, make sure you have some on hand, because clementines are not the most strongly flavored of the citrus fruits — their flavor is gently sweet, and the bitter punch is in the rind.

We thought of adding cranberries to ours; Ming Tsai has a master recipe wherein he adds julienned ginger and Thai bird chilies … mmmmm! However, those options we decided are for our next batch. This time, we were doing enough of an experiment with our marmalade — instead of using the full amount of sugar to guarantee it gelling, we wanted to experiment with agar.

Agar has many names, and you most likely first encountered it in high school biology, in the form of a petri dish. It’s a seaweed derived gelatin substitute, and can make a fully non-animal product jello-type of dish. It can also make rubber balls! It’s easy to use too much agar and have a food product turn inedible and disgustingly chewy, thus the experimental nature of our marmalade!

Using Haalo’s handy guide to removing citrus sections from pith, we set aside the plump orange sections to be added at the very end. We started small, with about two tablespoons of agar for our 3/4 c. of juice and 1/4 c. of lemon juice with a half cup of sugar. (Please note, this is NOT the equal ratio of sugar and juice which you would need to make traditional marmalade! If you try it like this without a gelling agent like pectin, it won’t set, but you’ll have a lovely syrup.) It turned out that it was too little agar; boiling produced a gorgeous, clear orange slurry which would not set. We ended up returning our saucepan to the heat and using a half-cup of agar powder, all told, and had a moment of sheer panic when it stiffened up. We needn’t have feared — agar works hot, and our marmalade’s consistency changed only a very little when it was cool.

Because traditional marmalade isn’t that stiff — it’s not jam, after all — we left it in a soft set. The flavor of the clementines was slightly overwhelmed by the more robust lemon juice — which was a bummer, next time we’ll use orange, maybe? — but the lovely julienned rinds provided the traditionally bitter marmalade flavor. Because we added the agar, we didn’t cook the mixture as long, and it is a much brighter, lighter color that other marmalades we have made.

The texture of this marmalade is …really interesting — It has a silky, chunky, jelly-like mouth feel, yet it will not go runny — when heated, and it retains its color and chunkiness. We imagine that biting into a fruit-filled pastry using this marmalade will be a very different experience, and we look forward to using it in baking.

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