Lemon Marmalade

My friend grows some beautiful lemon and lime trees, and she sent across a basket full of the biggest lemons I have ever seen in my life – slightly larger than a grapefruit! She also told me that only once you cut them open will you know if it’s a grapefruit, a pomelo, an orange or a just a really big lemon. It was all on luck. And now yes, we have the option of lemon cake, lemon cocktails and salad dressings – and yes, I did indulge in a lot of those (it was a very long weekend!), but at some point, I had to stop for fear of my teeth falling out! So, I decided a thick cut marmalade would be ideal and that high notes of cutting sourness with some herbaceous peppery undertones, perhaps a sweetness of vanilla might be great to play with. All I could imagine was a crispy almost-burnt white bread toast, with lots of butter dribbling down my arms with a spoonful of this bright lemon marmalade, and so my experiment began.

This jam recipe requires no pectin because lemons and oranges both already have high contents of pectin. Also, if you want to know the difference between a marmalade and jam, the definition goes like this: a jam uses the whole fruit, whereas the marmalade uses the flesh, peel and juice. Which to me mean the absolute same thing, but sometimes it’s best to let the Brits keep their views!