Kumquat overload

Welcome to my kumquat heaven hell chronicles!

When I was in college, I went to the North Carolina state fair with my roommate (hi, Molly, if you’re reading this). She wanted to look at the canned foods exhibit (I mean home canning, so jars, not aluminum cans – that would be weird), and I was like, really, chick? We’re looking at jelly? For fun? And now, when my family goes to the California state fair, I’m totally that chick, and my husband is the one going really?!? What can I say? Jelly is so pretty!

Whenever I have a surplus of produce, I get all filled with enthusiasm. My inner pioneer woman screams, “I could can that!!” Like everything else I do, of course, my motivation is higher when the idea is abstract than when it comes time to actually do the deed, as it were, which is really quite time consuming. But this time I actually got out all my supplies and did it. Proof:

Yes, this could just be a lot of pots, but I swear it's canning!

After picking the kumquats off the DWARF kumquat tree, I ended up with two full colanders of kumquats. I’m talking big colanders, like the kind that would hold enough pasta to feed a small army. 

I don't know if you can see that, but that is a 5.5 quart colander, which means I had ELEVEN quarts of kumquats.

What to do, what to do? As with everything, the answer was found through google. (Aside: Word does not recognize “google” as a word. Hmm, a little geek warfare?) I decided to make the following:

(I) Kumquat vanilla marmalade

I found multiple similar recipes for kumquat marmalade, but I ended up mostly going with this recipe from Lelo in Nopo, also flipping over here for comparison.

Of course I didn’t follow either exactly, so here is what I did:

INGREDIENTS:

·        8 cups kumquats

·        8 cups water

·        4 cups sugar

·        1 vanilla bean

DIRECTIONS:

(1)   Slice kumquats in half and seed. Keep the seeds in a small dish as you go. 

(2)   Further slice the kumquats into slivers. I couldn’t figure out if I was supposed to cut them the long way or the short way, so I did half of each. I don’t think it really matters. You will encounter more seeds as you go. Save these in your little dish too.

Note: This takes forever. Literally, these first two steps took an hour. 

 

(3)   Place the kumquat slices and the water in a large glass or ceramic bowl. Put the seeds in a cheesecloth bag and throw them in, too. Apparently this is to release pectin from the seeds (pectin makes the marmalade jell). It seems unnecessary, but I will say that on an early batch that I ruined, I soaked half my kumquats with seeds and half without, and the half with seeds did seem to jell better. But then I burned it (see my tip below).

(4)   Cover with a clean dish towel and soak overnight. I soaked for 24 hours. 

(5)   The next day, dump the bowl into a big pan and boil for 10 minutes.

(6)   Remove cheesecloth bag and add the sugar. Cut a slit the length of your vanilla bean and use your knife to scrape out all the sticky insides. Stir into pan. 

(7)   Cook at a gentle boil. Make sure you’re stirring regularly to keep it from burning to the bottom of the pan. The longer it cooks and the thicker it gets, the more I stir it to be safe. It’s done when it has jelled, which basically means it is getting pretty thick and gooey. You can test this by putting a spoonful of the liquid in the freezer for a couple minutes to bring it to room temp. Once the liquid stops being runny (you can turn the spoon without it immediately pouring out, and you can dip your finger in it, and it won’t drip off your finger), it’s ready. It’s kind of a matter of personal taste how thick you want it. It took me about an hour and 45 minutes to boil down. I ended up with about ¼ of what I started with in terms of volume.

Note: I only used half the sugar recommended by the other blog I was referencing (which recommended a 1:1 fruit to sugar ratio). For me this was plenty. You should taste your mixture after a bit of boiling to see how you like it. But do not, I repeat DO NOT, put a spoonful straight from the pan to your mouth. Boiling sugar mixtures are approximately the same temperature as the surface of the sun. Let the spoonful rest on the counter for a minute or two before tasting. Trust me.

TIP: If at any point during the cooking your child decides to have a total meltdown, turn off the stove entirely. Don’t think that you can just turn it down to low while you deal with the meltdown. If you do that, when the meltdown is over, you might notice that your house smells a lot like burned caramel, and then you might spend the next two days scrubbing a pan. I’m just saying.

ANOTHER TIP: If you are going to seal your jars in a water bath, get your water boiling after you start this step. A big boiler can take a long time to come to a boil, and you will need time to sterilize your jars. If you have no idea what I'm talking about but you are interested in canning, I suggest you start here, the mecca of home food preservation.

ANOTHER TIP: When sterilizing your jars, be careful as you add them to the boiling water. You want to lower them in SLOWLY and ON AN ANGLE so that the water gradually fills them and weighs them down. If you aren’t paying attention and lower them straight in, when the rim hits the water it will send a volcano of boiling water over your hand, and it will really really hurt. If you let them drop too quickly, you also risk splashing yourself with boiling water.

(8)   Once it’s ready, ladle the mixture into your hot sterilized jars (good name for a band?), leaving ¼ inch of headspace. Wipe the rims clean with a damp cloth and put the lid on. Remember that the jars were hot to start with, and then you ladled lava-hot marmalade into them, so use an oven mitt or a towel to hold them while you tighten the lids. (Just hand tighten if you’re sealing them, don’t get all aggro on them.)

(9)   If you are sealing them, process them in a hot water bath for 5 minutes, per the instructions here (unless you live at a higher altitude than I do, in which case you need more time).

And voila, only 27 hours later, you’ve got 4 jars of marmalade!!

(II) Candied kumquats in wine

Here I followed this recipe I found on the website for Kumquat Growers Inc. (Who knew?) I followed the recipe exactly as written, so I won’t bother to rewrite it here. The only thing I did differently was double it and use three buck chuck cabernet instead of merlot (if you don't know what that is, you don't live near a Trader Joe's, so you are terribly deprived). Oh, and I added a step and processed them in a hot water bath for 5 minutes to seal the jars at the end.

The kumquats come out super yummy and are delicious mashed up and eaten with soft cheese and crackers. Mmm mmm.

After I was done canning them, I still had some cooking liquid left over, so I experimented a little. I took 4 cups of kumquats and cut a slit in them the long way (about a third of the way through). Then I squeezed them gently and used the tip of my knife to pop out any seeds that appeared, and soaked them for one hour. 

After that, I simmered 1 cup of the reserved cooking liquid, 1 cup of 100% cranberry juice (the tart stuff), and 2 cups of sugar for about 10 minutes, added the kumquats and cooked for 10 minutes more. Finally, I processed for 5 minutes in a hot water bath. I haven’t tried these yet, but I’m sure they’re also quite yummy.

My final take:

Look at those beautiful jars! (Sorry, I’m not a food photographer, and my tile counter does not a very lovely backdrop make.) There are actually a few more in my fridge I forget to fish out. Even with those, it's a lot of work for not that much at the end, I know, but my inner pioneer woman is happy nonetheless.

And guess what? I STILL have about 2/3 of a colander filled with kumquats. After all that. Sigh.

Next up: kumquat bread. Report at 11.