A great break in the doll-drums of winter is the appearance of tangerines! Mom's tangerines start to pop up around mid-January. She has 3 small trees so, naturally there are tangerines everywhere for about a month. We try to harvest them regularly because the squirrels {and dogs} are quite fond of gobbling them up. This year, I was brainstorming on what I can make with them and jam came to mind! Now, if anyone has made jam, jelly or marmalade before, you'll know what I mean when I say that jam is not for the faint-hearted or detail-phobic. Jam is serious business. One little mistake or a few extra seconds of boiling, and that can spell disaster for your concoction. This is something I didn't really pay attention to when I decided to embark upon my jam making adventure. I figured that, as with the majority of my baking, as long as I have a recipe, it'll come out perfect. This is not the case. Jam takes love. Lots of L.O.V.E.
Jam making with Tangerines turned out to be quite the balancing act.
Sugar: tangerines are naturally sweeter than other citrus, so I won't need as much sugar.
Pith: with some warning from Mom, I had to be careful of the amount of pith I was going to include. The pith (white stuff) makes jam bitter. But a little bit of bitter makes jam taste more interesting. Anyone who knows tangerines, knows that they have a LOT of pith. There was some serious amounts of scraping and peeling going on to get rid of it. I'm not a fan of bitter jam or marmalade.
Peel: part of what makes citrus jam (or marmalade) so great, is the texture of the peel. You need the peel because it contains pectin. Pectin, if you don't know, is the stuff that makes jelly gel together. Some fruit have more or less - that's why you add extra pectin (powdered or liquid) into jams. It is mostly present in the skin of fruits, especially citrus. It can be complicated because the skin (and the white) can also make the jelly bitter. To counteract bitterness from the peel & pith, I decided to scrape off much of the pith from the peel, and cut it up in small slivers. No small feat with tangerine skin being soft and delicate. {thanks, Mom, for the help on this one. Did I ever mention that she's a great sous-chef?}
I was hoping for a mostly clear jam with chunks of whole slices and slivers of peel. So, I strained about a quarter of my tangerine pulp out because I didn't want it to be super pulpy.
The extra pectin I used was a liquid Certo. In hindsight, next time I'll probably use a powdered pectin to see if the jam comes out a bit more solid.
After canning it up and leaving it in the fridge for a couple of weeks {apparently, marmalade takes a little longer to firm up than other fruit jams}, I have a beautiful, sweet & delicious tangerine jam. Yay! Although exciting, the process is so labor intensive that I'll have to be seriously motivated to do it again. Or, maybe I'll just find a different recipe...
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