anyone have a Strawberry Marmalade recipe with no added pectin?

[patandchickens]

For no particular reason I am seized with the urge to make strawberry marmalade, which I have never had but seems like it should be good. I have googled but mostly just found versions where you add liquid or powdered store-boughten pectin, which IMO is *stupid* for a marmalade.

So does anyone happen to have a recipe for this that uses only the pectin from the citrus fruits already in the recipe?

If not, I will probably try adapting my rhubarb marmalade recipe (strawberries substituted for the rhubarb)and just hope that it doesn't cook all the flavor outta the strawberries. But I thought I'd ask here since it seems like the sort of thing some of y'all might know about

Thanks,

Pat

 

[keljonma]

Looking through old posts, Pat, and was wondering how your marmalade turned out..

 

[me&thegals]

Ha!! I didn't notice the date and wondered if this is when Canadian strawberries finally got ripe

 

[miss_thenorth]

LOL, in these parts, strawberries were finished by the time of that post.

When I saw the question and saw that keljonma replied, I thought, --only Keljonma would have a recipe for that.

 

[patandchickens]

Well of course there's still day-neutral strawberries to pick

I never did find a suitable-looking recipe, so I went ahead and did what I said in my original post -- substituted strawberries for rhubarb in the rhubarb marmalade recipe. It came out too runny (an excellent ice cream sauce or smoothie ingredient though!), but I do not know whether that was because of the recipe or because I was kind of rushing things and quit before the gel test *really* seemed right, which I must admit I did.

I may remake it sometime with boxed pectin, to turn it from sauce to jam... or I may just leave it as sauce/syrup, which it is quite good as.

If anyone reads this thread *now* and happens to have a no-pectin-added strawberry marmalade recipe, though, I'd certainly like to know for next year

Pat

 

[DrakeMaiden]

This may not be of any use to you at all, but I was reading along in the "Little Heathens" book and found a recipe for carrot marmalade (circa 1930's):

Cut up two cups of raw carrots, one large orange, and one large lemon; remove the seeds but leave the peel on; put through a meat grinder (nowadays, you would use a food processor). Then mix with one cup of sugar and half a cup of honey. Place in a straight-sided saucepan, cover, and simmer for ten minutes. (The cover is to ensure that the granulated sugar dissolves thoroughly.) Remove the cover and continue simmering and stir frequently for about forty-five minutes. Pour into sterilized jelly jars.

She said they never bothered to can it, as it got eaten too fast.

 

[ChickenToes]

I made an old fashioned strawberry preserve once, without added pectin. It turned out awful. The recipe had so much sugar in it, and you cooked it for so long that it just tasted like super-sugary, slightly fruity tasting syrup. I am now a firm believer in added pectin!

 

[patandchickens]

This may not be of any use to you at all, but I was reading along in the "Little Heathens" book and found a recipe for carrot marmalade (circa 1930's)

I make that (type thing -- I *think* my recipe has more citrus in it?) periodically, it's actually pretty good!

The secret to no-pectin-added strawberry jam IME is twofold: 1) use about half underripe berries and half barely-ripe ones, and 2) use one of the long-soak-with-sugar methods to minimize cooking time.

The reason you can do no-pectin-added MARMALADES, on the other hand, is because the citrus fruits (which is what makes it a marmalade) provide all the pectin you could need, at least if you are playin' your cards right. Totally different thing than just making *jam* from a low-pectin fruit.

Pat

 

[DrakeMaiden]

Maybe I will have to give the carrot marmalade a try. It sounded interesting to me, but I wasn't sure if I would like it.

Yes, I would have thought that if you use citrus (does lemon have more pectin than orange?) in the right proportion then that is where you will get all your pectin. I guess that means you just need to play around with the recipe. I'm surprised no one else has tried and posted a recipe on-line.