Pear Marmalade with Honey

I've been posting alot about my baking adventures lately but I hardly ever post any recipes. Originally I wasn't going to . I wanted this blog to be about my adventures and the things I've learned on my quest but let's face it. How mean isn't it to post about all these nummy things and not tell you how to make them? So I will slowly start adding my recipes as well. It's probably a good idea. That way I have everything gathered in one place and I wont lose my recipes or confuse them with each other.

Pear Marmalade with Honey
1.5 kg Pears(peeled and cored)
1 Lemon(0.75 dl lemon juice)
25 g Ginger(fresh)
500 g Jam Sugar(syltsocker)
3 tablespoons Honey

Afgter peeling and coreing the pears, cut them into small pieces and put them in a pot.
Squeeze the lemon and pour this over the pears.
Bring the pears to a boil then simmer on low heat for about 10 minutes(until the pears are soft and mushy).
Peel the ginger and cut them julienne(or in small pieces).
Add ginger, jam sugar and honey to the pot and let it boil strongly for at least 2 minutes.
Put the pot aside and leave it for 5 minutes.
After 5 minutes, skim the pot using a perforated ladle.
Pour the marmalade into hot, sterilized jars.

This marmalade is very sweet and it's hard to decide whether it's more like honey or more like marmalade. I made3 a second batch and reduced the jam sugar to about 425-450 gram and it turned out much better in my opinion.

Now let's talk about methods. When I make jam and other perserves I prefer to use air tight glas jars. I start by cleaning them thoroughly. Even if they're already clean. It's very important to use very clean jars. I then pop them in the oven on a damp towel on a low heat(about 100C) for at least 20 minutes.
Right before it's time to fill them I take them out of the oven and rinse the insides with a little bit of Sodium Benzoate dissolved in water.
When the jars have been filled I immediately put the lid on, turn them upside down and leave them until cooled off completely.

If you want to take things one step further you can also mix some Sodium Benzoate with a spoonfull of marmalade which you then mix with the rest of the marmalade.

And if you don't want your marmalade to turn brown you might also consider adding some Ascorbic Acid to the marmalade.

Both the Ascorbic Acid and the Sodium Benzoate can be bought in a regular grocery store. Usually near the baking supplies. Dosage for mixing it into jams and marmalades is usually found on the package. For the rinse I mix about half a teaspoon of Sodium Benzoate and half a litre of water.

One day a few weeks ago the neighbor came knocking on our door. He asked if we wanted pears off his pear tree before he threw them out. All we had to do was to go pick them. That is how I ended up with 17 kilos of very sweet and juicy pears. That was the perfect oportunity to make marmalade and jams. Spread out over the weeks I have been trying different recipes. It's not hard at all to make marmalade. Especially not if you use the special sugar with added pectin. It is a bit time consuimg though. Especially if you want to be thourough and sterilize jars and so on.

After a few days spent in the kitchen peeling, dicing and boiling pears I ended up with quite the collection of jams as well as a few jars of pear sauce. There's pear marmalade with honey and ginger, pear marmalade with lemon and vanilla and pear marmalade with lemon, ginger and walnuts. They are all very nummy and so far we have opened a couple of jars of the honey marmalade - it's great with some brie white mold cheese.



I even printed out some nice tags for the jars so that I don't forget whats in them.