June 27, 2014 | By: Stephanie Quesada How It Works
Preserving Your Own Food: Making Your Own Fruit Marmalade & Jams Not just for a cheap snack but for getting ready with food off the grid
by Stephanie Quesada for REACH
So you GROW your own Food, and you have a bounty of a harvest from your garden or your small farm. If you are prepping, what to do with all that food?
Have you ever thought about making your own jam or marmalade using local fruits? Imagine a sandwich spread made from pomelo, or maybe some crackers with a dollop of dalandan preserve... wouldn’t it just be so scrumptious? All those flavors available to you every day in your storage pantry or fridge. Not only would it be so, but it would also be good food that is free from chemical preservatives and very nutritious!
Ponkan Fruit Marmalade: Look Ma, no preservatives!!
I’ve tried experimenting with this for a while, and found the simplest way to make them. Just follow some very simple steps I’m going to tell you, and fill your fridge with your favorite flavors. Who knows, you could even sell extra jars, or give them away as a special little home-made gift that will strum your loved one’s heart strings.
Below are some simple steps to make ponkan flavored marmalade for a start. This simple instruction set is going to be the most complicated out of other fruit jam options. So depending on which fruits you’re going to use, only a few of the steps will change or be skipped altogether, which I’m going to tell you about later.
What you will need are:
A juicer with a strainer or just a strainer A saucepan A mixing bowl A stove A wooden spoon A chopping board A knife Two medium sized jars, or one big, empty mayo jar And the ingredients that you want to have are: 6 whole ponkans 1 cup of sugar Three calamansi fruits or 1 lemon
Steps for Making the Ponkan Marmalade:
Step 1: Juice all the ponkan and calamansi/lemon in a mixing bowl. Make sure to remove all the pits. It’s better if there’s a bit of pulp mixed in for texture (and fiber is good for the body too!) but remove all the thick parts. Pour in the sugar and mix.
Step 2:Put 3 fruits worth of the peel in a saucepan with water. Make sure to submerge the peel. Boil them until you can stick a fork through the peel.
Step 3: Once the peel is soft enough, strain them and place on the chopping board. Let it cool for a bit and chop into really thin strips.
Step 4: Remove the water from the saucepan and place the pulpy juice mixture inside. Take note of how high it looks in the saucepan, and boil while stirring every few minutes until the mixture recedes in half.
Step 5: Mix in the chopped-up rind, and let it cool
for a bit before pouring in the jars. If it’s too hot, the jars might break from the change in temperature, so be careful.
Once cool enough, pour them inside, and let it sit for a few minutes until it reaches room temperature, and then refrigerate!
This mix lasts about a year inside the refrigerator, although I doubt it will sit very long in there due to the sheer yumminess of the fruit preserve. You might want to try other citrus fruits as well, although for fruits like Pomelo which has a really thick peel, you might want to skip steps 2 and 3. It also has a natural bitterness to it, especially if you add more of the pulp, so be careful.
Other fruits to try can be: pure calamansi, dalanghita, mango, pineapple, and a whole lot of others!
You Just adjust the sugar level according to the fruits’ natural sweetness, and their relative size. For example, a mango might be twice as large and twice as sweet as a ponkan, so it should have maybe half the amount of sugar for just three mangoes. Try experimenting to see what you can come up with!
