All posts in Canning

The recipe comes from Ball’s Complete Book of Home Preserving

Quote from the book:

Traditional Marmalades

Due to their extended cooking times, traditional marmalades have a slightly caramelized flavor that spells perfection to marmalade aficionados. Before making one of these long-boil marmalades, review the gel state tests …

Gel State Tests: When not using something like pectin to make a spread you need to make sure your mix has reached “gel state”.

The easiest and best way to do this is with a candy thermometer.

Orange Chilli Marmalade:

2 1/4 pounds of oranges thinly sliced (I used mandarine which creates more peels, a bigger orange might have less peels, depends what you like)

6 cups of water

zest of one lemon

juice of one lemon

3 dried chilli pepers (they recommend habanero or New Mexico chili)

9 cups granulated sugar

1. In a stock pot combine oranges, zest, water, juice.
2. Bring to a boil over high heat stirring frequently
3. Add peppers
4. Reduce to a gentle boil, partially covered, for 40 minutes stirring occasionally until fruit is soft
5. remove and discard peppers
6. Bring mixture back to a full boil stirring constantly
7. Gradually stir in sugar
8. Wait until mixture reaches gel stage (about 15 minutes)
9. Ladle into hot jars leaving 1/4″ headspace
10. Process jars in boiling water for 10 minutes

I’ve finally got a bit of free time to catch up on my videos. I made this video in early November at my brother’s house in Harrisburg PA. He grows quite a bit of hot peppers and I suggested that we can up some hot sauce.

This sauce is excellent, don’t let the name fool you, it isn’t super hot. You could easily make this sauce hotter by adding in seeds from the peppers. I’ll let you decide that.

This is literally the first time I canned anything in my life, so hopefully you can all get a chuckle as I hold the jar lifter upside down and in general just goof off with my friends.

We learn a couple of skills in this video:

• Canning via the hot water bath method
• Saving seeds from pepper
• How to make hot sauce (obviously)

Here is the link to the recipe I used: Bob’s Habanero Hot Sauce