Last weekend, my canning buddy Shani and I kicked off our planned year of canning (commitment to get together at least every two months to have a day of preserving stuff) with a date to make some marmalade. She’d gotten me a new recipe book Tart and Sweet for Christmas and I’d spied a recipe for candied kumquats that looked very interesting. Since we knew kumquats were available right now, we knew we needed to get moving.
Of course, when I went to the local grocery where I’d seen the kumquats, they didn’t have any more. Which meant that on Saturday morning, I was shopping at my favorite fancy pants gourmet shop looking for some. Found them and realized that fancy pants shop had a whole lot of interesting citrus. After a quick back and forth, I walked out with kumquats, meyer lemons, and bergamot. If you have never sniffed a bergamot, you should seek one out and try it – they smell SO good. All morning, we would circle back to the bowl holding them until we were ready for them and breathe.
We started with the kumquats, which were fiddly but not difficult. Blanched them the three times the recipe wanted and then packed them into their syrup full of vanilla, star anise and cinnamon. Shani had prepped lemons for marmalade the night before (a lot of the recipes we’ve found want the citrus to soak in water overnight before you use it) and we did that next. It was pretty simple; combine the lemon slices, some sugar and a little vanilla and cook it down until it was nice and thick.
After a quick break for lunch. we moved on to prepping the bergamot. After reviewing the recipes we had for it, we settled on a roughly half and half mix with lemons. We decided to add some teabags to the initial simmering – since bergamot is used in Earl Grey, Shani thought that some tea would give the jam an interesting depth. While the bergamot were simmering in their first round of blanching, we made what I thought was the most interesting preserve of the day – preserved lemons.
To make these, you cut the tips of your lemons, then cut deep Xs in each end, not quite deep enough to go all the way through, but close. Then you pack each lemon with as much salt as you can fit into the cuts and press them into a hot jar, squeezing out juice to cover the lemons. About 7 or 8 lemons fit into each jar by the time we were done, and now we have to leave them to sit for about a month. After that, they’re reportedly good in anything you want to add a salty, lemony kick to. I’m very…interested to try the finished product.
By the time we finished that, the bergamot and lemons were ready for their start turn. Given that both the fruits we were using were fairly bitter, we added a little more sugar than our recipe called for and cooked it down until it was this beautiful deep honey brown color. We accidentally mad more than we thought we were, so we had to break the last bunch up into two different batches.
Just like our last couple of times out, we might have overestimated how much we could get done in a single day, and we didn’t finish up the last batch until after 11:00. I think we’ve agreed that we need a pound limit on how much we should try to process in one session.
Next time, we’re going to try pickling some carrots and some cauliflower, and if I can find all the right spicy bits, we’re going to try making something called fire vinegar, which is going to make an excellent Christmas present for my spicy food loving brother.
