Grapefruit Bourbon Marmalade

In Phoenix, citrus is almost treated as a pest plant. Most people don’t use the fruit and have a hard time keeping up with it when it’s in season, leaving it to rot on the ground and attract roof rats and other unsavory scavengers. In my back yard alone, I have grapefruit and tangelo overhanging my fence from the neighbors, I have my own huge tangelo tree and a pomegranate. Within the neighborhood we have countless grapefruit, orange, tangerine, clementine, tangelo and one lonely lemon tree (that we all sort of fight over).

Last year I gave a lot of citrus away to folks who were not quite so surrounded with it, used what I could, juiced a lot of it and unfortunately fed the rest into compost. This year I really wanted to try some new stuff with the citrus and preserve it. Among other things I’ve started getting into marmalades for the first time. A friend of mine showed me a recipe for Bitter Grapefruit Whisky Marmalade online and we decided it would be a great recipe to play with so I gave it a shot.

This recipe uses the natural pectin in the seeds and pith of the fruit. My grapefruit didn’t have many seeds and seemed to be low in pectin. In my first cook, the marmalade never set. So I dumped it all back in the pot and cooked it out again making sure to reach 220 degrees with a candy thermometer. After that is set just fine. The traditional ratio from all the recipes I’ve looked at for marmalade is 1:1:1 (1 part fruit, 1 part water, 1 part sugar). I used  little more water and a little less sugar in mine because I had very sweet fruit to start with and it seemed to work out. It also may have been why it didn’t set the first time.

The original recipe called for Whisky (scotch malt stuff, not American whiskey) but I chose to use Bourbon because I like the flavor better…and it’s what I had in the cabinet.

Grapefruit Bourbon Marmalade

Recipe Type: Preserve

Author: Dave Creech

Prep time: 15 mins

Inactive time: 12-24 hours

Cook time: 65 mins

Total active time: 1 hour 30 mins

Makes: 4-6 half pint jars

This is a fairly easy seasonal preserve to take advantage of abundant winter citrus.

Ingredients

• 5 cups grapefruit (I used sweet pink grapefruit in mine)
• 5 cups clean filtered water
• 4-5 cups granulated or bakers sugar (you might want to adjust your sugar to reach desired sweetness)
• 1/2 cup Bourbon of choice

Instructions

1. Wash and cut the grapefruit in quarters, remove and retain any seeds and pieces, and then slice the fruit finely (cut smaller sections if you want smaller fruit in the marmalade).
2. Place the seeds in muslin or cheese cloth and tie up into a sachet with string. Place the grapefruit and sachet in a large saucepan, add water, and leave overnight or for about 12 to 24 hours.
3. Boil the fruit for 30 minutes, covered.
4. Stir in sugar and do not allow to boil until the sugar has completely dissolved into the water.
5. Once the sugar has dissolved boil rapidly on high, stirring occasionally, until set has been reached. I use a candy thermometer to make sure it reaches 220 degrees.
6. Add Bourbon and boil for a few minutes to cook out the alcohol. Your whole house will smell like Bourbon, for better or worse.
7. Remove and squeeze the seed sachet to extract as much pectin as possible and discard the sachet (compost the contents if you can).
8. Carefully ladle the marmalade into warm sterilized jars and cap immediately.

 

Make it Your Own

You could definitely play with the flavor on this if you want to. The Bourbon adds a level of complex flavor to the marmalade that you may not want to mess with, but you could try adding some lighter complementary flavors to it like vanilla bean or natural mint to give it an interesting slant. I served mine on homemade buttermilk biscuits with a little cream cheese and they were fantastic. I like to pair marmalade with a nice soft cheese to offset the bitter sweetness. My lemon marmalade pairs very well with a warm Brie.

PS –

I had high hopes of using a decent amount of grapefruit in this but it only took 3 grapefruit to make 5 cups of fruit slices. It also cooked down to less than half the volume so you could easily double this batch if you have a large enough pot and hot enough burners to do it. On my range, I would never be able to get it to temp if I increased the recipe.