How to make crumpets
Every year for the past decade I've been getting out my marmalade spoon to judge The World Marmalade Awards in England's Cumbria. Jars get flown over from home cooks and small producers around the world, all hoping to snatch the World's Best Marmalade title. Australian cooks win often, with perfectly set jars punchy with citrus flavour, and one reason is that many of us have citrus trees in our gardens. So if you've never made marmalade, you can start today, and eat it this weekend with great straightforward crumpets.
Easy crumpets
Make these crumpets the day before eating, or make and freeze ahead, as crumpets need a few hours to settle after cooking for the texture to firm. The number of holes you get on top depends on getting the water/flour ratio just right, so you may need to vary the water by a few teaspoons each time you make it to nail this recipe perfectly. You'll need a set of muffin or crumpet rings and a heat diffuser.
INGREDIENTS
350ml warm water
7g sachet fast-action yeast
10g (2 rounded tsp) baking powder
2g (1/2 tsp) bicarbonate of soda
2g (1/2 tsp) salt
10ml cider vinegar, optional, for flavour
250g white bread flour
butter, oil and flour for cooking
METHOD
1. Pour the water into a mixing bowl and whisk in the yeast until dissolved. Then whisk in the baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. Beat in the flour until very smooth.
2. Cover the bowl and leave for about 2 hours, until the mixture has risen and looks bubbly. Don't disturb it, and don't stir it as it rises, as you want to keep all the aeration in it.
3. Butter the insides of your muffin rings, dip them in flour, then drop them onto a dry dinner plate to bang-off any excess: you want the inside of each ring coated in butter and lightly dusted with flour
4. Sit a large, heavy-based frying pan on a heat diffuser pad over a low heat and oil the base well. When it's sizzling reduce the heat, put the rings in and spoon enough of the crumpet mixture in to fill each ring by a third.
5. With the heat very low, wait until the mixture rises, the surface fills with air holes and dries out; this should take about 10 minutes. Then flip the rings over with a spatula, lightly brown the top then release the crumpets carefully with a knife. Leave the crumpets to cool while you wash and recoat the rings and cook the rest of the batter.
Makes 8
Grapefruit and cardamom whole fruit marmalade
An easy three-day recipe that produces a jelly set with very tender and beautifully translucent peel. You'll need a sugar thermometer and four 500ml screw top jars.
INGREDIENTS
600g grapefruit
90ml fresh lemon juice
1200g water
12-24 cardamom pods, crushed open
900g white sugar
METHOD
1. Halve and squeeze the juice and pips from the grapefruit and place in a large mixing bowl with the lemon juice. Slice the peel any way you like: my new favourite way is using the slicing attachment on the food processor, which quickly turns the peel to fine slivers. Add the peel and water to the juices in the bowl, cover and leave for 24 hours.
2. Tip the contents of the mixing bowl and the cardamom pods into a large saucepan. Bring to the boil and cook until the peel is very tender – just over an hour for very thin shreds or two hours for thicker pieces. The contents of the saucepan should have also reduced by half.
3. Test for pectin and acidity (see tips), and reduce volume more if needed to concentrate the marmalade for a good set. Add the sugar, bring to a bare simmer then switch off and leave for 24 hours. This allows the peel to slowly absorb the sugar syrup and produces a better peel texture and transparency.
4. The following day have your clean jam jars and screw lids ready. Bring the marmalade to a rolling boil. Skim off any pips that rise to the top and cook until the temperature reaches 104C on a thermometer. Switch off the heat, leave until the temperature drops to 80C then ladle the marmalade into the clean jars and screw on the lids immediately.
Makes about 4 x 500g jars
Marmalade perfection points
■ Soaking the peels overnight in water acidified with lemon and grapefruit juice breaks down the structure of the pith and pips slightly, releasing pectin into the water and giving you a better set.
■ Testing for pectin: put a teaspoonful of marmalade cooking liquid in a cup and pouring on roughly the same amount of methylated spirits. If the cooking liquid forms a gel clump in the cup, the pectin is fine. If it doesn't, reduce the cooking liquid in the saucepan and test again until it does. Don't drink the liquid: meths is alcohol with added chemicals to make it toxic. Throw it away after testing.
■ Test for acidity: the cooking liquid should taste mildly but clearly acidic with lemon. But to double-check, stick in a strip of 1-14 pH testing strips (order through eBay). You're looking for an acidity reading of around 2.8-3.2. When marmalade doesn't set, the culprit is often low acidity, so you can sometimes warm the marmalade, check and adjust the acidity by adding more lemon juice and reboil it to 104C.
■ Leave the peel overnight once you've added the sugar and heated the mixture to a bare simmer. This technique causes the peel to draw in sugar syrup, making it very tender and also giving it a similar specific gravity to the syrup so the peel will suspend evenly in the jar.
■ You'll need a thermometer to ensure the marmalade reaches the setting point, 104C. The temperature relates to the ratio of sugar to water in the pan – the higher the temperature, the higher the concentration of sugar in it – so reducing the sugar in the recipe won't produce a low-sugar marmalade but instead increases the concentration of pectin and acidity in the syrup once heated to 104C.
■ When you followed all the steps above correctly, the syrup will be surprisingly liquid, rather than jammy, when boiling. It will set as it cools in the jar so don't expect it to look like warmed jam in the pan. The magic happens as it cools.