Meyer Lemon Marmalades

After I got back from visiting my nieces up north last month, I bought 1½ quarts of blueberries at the local orchard and three pounds of Meyer lemons at the supermarket to use in recipe testing Canning for a New Generation. I had previously tried the Blueberry – Meyer Lemon Marmalade, but received some feedback on how to tweak the recipe to make it even better. The Meyer Lemon and Rose Petal Marmalade was going to be an interesting experiment.

What is a Meyer Lemon?

A Meyer lemon is a small citrus fruit that originated in China and is believed to be a hybrid between a lemon and an orange. It is much smaller and rounder than a regular lemon. As far as taste goes, a Meyer lemon is sweeter, milder and less acidic than a regular lemon. Allegedly, its aroma has hints of honey and thyme, but I’ve never noticed that.





Blueberry-Meyer Lemon Marmalade

I left an 8-ounce jar of the first batch of Blueberry – Meyer Lemon Marmalade with my parents, and they most definitely had some feedback on the product. They both liked that the blueberries were intact, but Dad wasn’t a fan of chewing the segments of Meyer lemon. He thought it would be better if I simply zested the Meyer lemon to retain the flavor and eliminate the chewiness. I liked this idea since I had some significant issues with segmenting the citrus in my first batch.

My zesting tool pulls off the zest in long thin strips, so I figured it would be better if I grated the Meyer lemon on the small hand grater that I use for parmesan cheese. The holes didn’t seem all that fine. But I found out that the peel of a Meyer lemon is much thinner than the peel of a regular lemon, as it only took two or three passes on the grater before I was down to the fruit. And the peel seemed to be grated superfine. There seemed to be no way that I was going to be able to get the proper pectin level using the zest because there was so little of it resulting from the area that I had grated. So I gave up on zesting the Meyer lemons, and went back to segmenting them.

To segment citrus, basically you cut as close as possible to the membrane of the citrus segment and then pull off the membrane so that you just have the naked fruit. There is a lot of manhandling of the citrus involved to get the membranes off. And sometimes the membrane pulls the citrus with it! The last time I made the recipe, I followed the recipe steps and cut the segments into ¼ inch pieces. This time, to address Dad’s concern, I cut each segment in half again lengthwise and then cut them crosswise as thinly as possible. I don’t know how long it took me – it was already late at night – but eventually I turned a pound of Meyer lemons into a bowl of tiny pieces.

The marmalade comes together very easily once the citrus has been segmented. First, you heat together the fresh blueberries, lemon juice, and white sugar until the blueberries are covered in juices. That takes all of five minutes. Then you drain off the juice, reserving the blueberries. I made the mistake of using a fine metal sieve for this operation rather than plastic colander. The blueberries drained well, but the sieve was a pain to clean afterward. You return the juice to the heat and stir in the segmented citrus. And here’s where things get a little odd: you also take all the membranes, seeds, and scraps from the segmenting process, wrap those in a piece of cheesecloth, and add that bundle to the juice. This little bundle is a pectin booster! The marmalade wouldn’t jell properly without out. You boil it all together until it reaches 220F on a candy thermometer, which meant that I had to use my shallower Faberware pot instead of my red enamel Dansk soup pot so that the thermometer could actually reach the mixture. But the mixture never really threatened to overflow, even when at a full boil. It did get very thick and start to splatter a little when the bubbles popped. Once the mixture reaches 220F, you stir back in the blueberries, heat through to the setting point, and water process can the stuff for five minutes. Of course, you do have to remove the pectin bundle and squeeze that out quite thoroughly before beginning the water process canning.

I must say that aside from the drama of segmenting the Meyer lemons, I really had no difficulty with this recipe. In fact, as I looked at the three pints of blueberries in the refrigerator and the two pounds of Meyer lemons on my counter, I thought of doing a second batch. But it was after 11pm, and my hands were painfully raw from the lemon juice, so I decided to postpone that decision until the following morning. At that time, I decided to freeze the blueberries so they wouldn’t go bad while I was on vacation, and reserve the Meyer lemons for their original purpose: Meyer Lemon and Rose Petal Marmalade.

Meyer Lemon and Rose Petal Marmalade

When I first saw the recipe for Meyer Lemon and Rose Petal Marmalade in Canning for a New Generation, I absolutely knew that I had to try it. It sounded so dainty and yet so robust all at the same time. However, due to an overzealous order from Zamouri Spices, I currently have more dried rose petals than an Italian-Polish girl should. So I may start inventing ways to use them – both as an edible and as a beauty treatment.

Since the first step of making this divine sounding marmalade involves segmenting two pounds of Meyer lemons, I put off this recipe for about two weeks after buying my Meyer lemons. I can barely tolerate segmenting one pound of Meyer lemons, but TWO pounds! When I weighed what was supposed to be two one-pound packages of Meyer lemons, I only had one and one-half pounds of fruit. So I decided to segment the fruit that I did have, buy more fruit in the morning, and segment the new fruit at that point. However, I actually had to quit the first segmenting session with one Meyer lemon left because my hands were so raw and irritated. I had to coat my hands with cortisone cream before going to bed in order to stop the itching and burning. That really healed up my hands nicely. I still delayed segmenting that last Meyer lemon until I bought more at the supermarket the following morning. This time the bag weighed a full pound, and I used all of them to bring the total amount of fruit in the recipe up to two and a half pounds. When I picked up with the segmenting project in the afternoon, it went much more smoothly with the fresh fruit.

After segmenting the fruit, the recipe has three basic steps: boil together the Meyer lemon segments with water, lemon juice, and cheesecloth bag of membranes and seeds (another pectin booster!) until the fruit is tender; add sugar and rose petals then boil until the syrup reaches 220F; and water process can the marmalade. The one step that the recipe didn’t account for was sorting the stems and sticks from the rose petals. I don’t know if every culinary rose petal purchase is like the one I made from Zamouri Spices, but the bag was easily half stems and sticks. The ingredients say “rose buds” even though the package is marketed and labeled as “rose petals.” Fortunately, I was able to get that nasty little task done while the fruit was boiling to tender so it didn’t add any extra time to the recipe. When I finally added the required amount of rose petals, it didn’t seem like enough relative to the fruit. So I added two tablespoons more, which seemed closer to the right proportion. The timing in the recipe – about 30 minutes each for the two boiling steps – seemed about right. Water processing gave me no trouble, other than that this recipe filled more four-ounce jars than I could process at once, so I had to do two batches.

I tried the marmalade that was leftover in the pot after filling all the jars. It was very good! Nice and lemony. However, despite the addition of the extra rose petals, I couldn’t taste any rose flavor. But the pink petals and green leaves looked nice in the marmalade.

The Verdict

Both Meyer lemon marmalades were very good, each in its own way. Aside from the pain of segmenting the lemons in preparation for the marmalades, the recipes came together fairly quickly and very easily. All the timing and directions given in the recipe were accurate, which was definitely nice. Although I won’t be needing marmalade for quite some time, I’d definitely make these recipes again, and recommend them to friends.