Thursday 28 June 2012

Lime marmalade Incinerade

Still have more fruit than I can use, so I made some lime marmalade. Added a pile of Habanero chillies as well, so it's pretty hot. Not sure what i'll use it for ... it's more like a lime + chillie jelly with a bit of bitterness.

Got of the infernal machines yesterday and got a bit productive in general, also did 3 loads of washing, mowed the lawn, started brewing some beer ...

Ingredients

500gFinely sliced ripe limes (mine are yellow on the outside with a very thin skin, lime-green on the inside, and very juicy).
40gFinely sliced Habanero chillies (this is a TON of heat)
60gGrated ginger
600mlWater (i.e. equal weight to fruit)
600gSugar (i.e. equal weight to fruit)
Pips from some other pippy citrus. I used half a dozen kumquats which are loaded with large seeds.

Method

  1. Place the lime, chillies, ginger and water in a pot and soak overnight.
  2. Wrap the pips in some chux and tie up, place in the pot and bring to the boil.
  3. Simmer for at least 30 minutes.
  4. Pour in the sugar and stiry until dissolved (I initially removed the pips at this point, but as it took forever to set I put them back).
  5. Simmer until it sets on a plate in the freezer, 30 minutes plus. It's supposed to skin when pushed.
  6. Pour into sterlised jars and seal while still hot. Makes about 4.5 250ml jars.

I had trouble geting the 'plate set test' to work - and ended up simmering it for a bit over an hour. But when I went to bottle it it started to stick in my funnel after the first jar and it turned solid enough to turn upside-down as soon as it cooled off a bit. In short I think I cooked it a bit longer than I needed to, but not enough to hurt it (made it a bit more orange coloured than it would otherwise have been).

Initially I only put 40g of habaneros, but I thought I may as well make it worth the effort and grabbed a few more from the freezer as I was cooking it.

Results

Has a nice sweet and intensely lime flavour with a generous hint of marmalade bitterness. It set solid - like jelly - although it is cloudy (mostly from the ginger pulp I guess).

The habanero chillies add a big kick - that gets more intense with each drop as they usually do. I had some tiny amount with kabana and cheese on crackers and it worked pretty well. Yet to try it on toast with coffee ..

It looks and smells like a nice sweet marmalade, but a corn-kernel sized piece is enough to set your whole mouth afire.

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