Grapefruit Marmalade

This was the first time that I have ever work for citrus for a canning project. I bought a case of grapefruit and a case of oranges. I love grapefruit so I decided to start with a Grapefruit Marmalade from the Ball book. 

I started by thinly peeling the grapefruit and the scraping away all of the white from the inside of the peel.

Then the peel was cut into small strips.

After that I followed the directions in the Ball book to make and then process the marmalade.

Final Product:

I decided that working with citrus really is a lot of work! I will probably do it again, but buying a much smaller quantity of citrus. I had a lot of it and every recipe that I made seemed to take me much longer than anything else I have made. I told Kip that this is liquid gold it took me so long to do! I made a few other citrus recipes from the same book and h ad mixed results. I canned some Crimson Honey Grapefruit that was supposed to stay in sections, but completely came apart on me. I don't know if is was a beginner error or what. They still tasted great and I eat them with breakfast, but it is definitely an eat with a spoon jar. Hopefully before citrus season rolls around again I will have found someone to give me some helpful hints.

Dehydrated Citrus

I was able to buy a couple of cases of citrus on a bulk order a few days ago. I love citrus fruits and I was looking for several different ways of preserving what we couldn't eat before it needed to be eaten. I have made juice, marmalade, canned it in various ways and also decided to dehydrate some for later. I have more lemons in the dehydrator. Most of these will probably end up in tea at some point, but I would love to hear what you do with dehydrated citrus.

I am still loving my new Excalibur dehydrator. Deciding to buy one took me about two years of debating back and forth with myself. I knew I would use it and and it would be worth it in the end, but it was still a hard decision. I am happy to say that after a couple of months and many batches later that I have zero buyer's regret. In fact, after my first batch, when I saw how beautiful my dehydrated food was, I only wished I had gotten it sooner.