In the run up to the Marmalade Awards in March this year we decided to play around with some new flavours. The first idea was to make a marmalade with Oroblanco (sweetie grapefruit) and Rose-petals. It is in the experimental phase that you learn new things like if you want to have a rose flavour you need to add it at the end! So with the Oroblanco I made a delicious marmalade that doesn’t taste of rose. I also discovered that the season for Sweetie grapefruit is very short. The next time I went to the fruit market there weren’t any left – quel dommage. What to do? I could try using pomelo instead. Pomelo & Rose was born (I use rosewater instead of petals).
Last year we experimented with Quince, grown in Edinburgh by one of our customers. I had read somewhere that quince is the original marmalade fruit – the Romans noticed that if you cooked quince very slowly with some honey it forms a paste. The origin of marmalade is the Portuguese word Marmelo which is originally Latin. So anyway, we thought it might be fun to add the fruits together. The result is lovely slightly less tart than straight Seville marmalade with a lightly floral flavour. We have a new member of staff who wanted to join in. She had the idea of pairing Seville oranges, pink grapefruit & persimmon (also known as Sharon fruit). We discovered that once you cook persimmon it takes on the texture similar to potato. However you do end up of a wonderful flavour so we now cook this in the muslin bag so we can easily fish it out before potting up.
We have been experimenting with using different gins in our products. Our best-selling Raspberry with Vanilla Rose Gin has proved so popular we thought we might try a marmalade. Our lovely friends Vicky & Dale McQueen of McQueen Gin produce the vanilla rose gin, but they also make a sweet citrus gin which we tried in a Seville orange marmalade which is very popular with our customers. We had the wheel-chair curling team from Canada call in to the unit in early March & loved it so much there are 8 jars flying back to Toronto – along with a lot of other things they purchased. Apparently you can’t get good marmalade in Canada.
So, as you can see even really experienced cooks who produce some the of the best marmalades around are still experimenting & sometimes it works better than others. All of our new flavours are available at farmers markets. If you want to reserve yours just drop me an email. info@perthshirepreserves.co.uk