Grapefruit marmalade

When winter is in full swing, it usually means it's citrus season and time to make marmalade like this homemade grapefruit marmalade. This easy recipe for grapefruit marmalade uses the whole fruit method so you aren't spending hours chopping citrus and separating the peel from the fruit.

Ingredients to make grapefruit marmalade

You don't need to use pectin when you make a batch of marmalade. The three ingredients for this recipe are really simple:

• whole citrus fruit, washed well to remove any waxes that may be present on the surface of the fruit
  • white grapefruit are the least sweet and the bitter grapefruit flavour of the peel will dominate in marmalade
  • ruby red grapefruit are the most sweet
  • pink grapefruit offer a good balance of bitter and sweet, but not too sweet
• granulated sugar, which is essential to balancing out the bitterness of the citrus peel and also to ensure your marmalade will set
• lemon juice to control pH, which ensures pectin activation to gel the marmalade properly, but also to ensure the sugar doesn't crystallize

If you have the right ratio of fruit to sugar, you're on your way to perfect marmalade. For the recipes on this website, we use a ratio that is close to 1:1 by weight of fruit to sugar.

If you have a little more fruit, that's okay. But try to measure out your ingredients so that they are close to this ratio to ensure that your marmalade will set properly.

Making marmalade from whole citrus fruit

Using whole fruit for grapefruit marmalade means you are using every part of the fruit. While other methods will have you separate the outer peel from the flesh of the fruit, the whole fruit method is also a lot easier to do:

1. Boil the whole citrus fruit for 2 hours or until very soft.
2. Drain and let cool.
3. Cut each grapefruit into two, then split each half into quarters or smaller sections.
4. Separate the flesh of the fruit from the soft peel with your knife (it should separate quite easily), removing seeds as you go.
5. Chop the flesh fairly finely. Try to remove some of the membranes that separate the segments of the fruit if they seem tough.
6. Slice the peel into strips.
7. Place the sliced fruit (flesh and peel) back into a big clean pot and mix with sugar and lemon juice.
8. Boil until you reach the marmalade setting point, which for this recipe is around 104–105 ºC (220 ºF).
9. Take the pot of marmalade and let it sit for 2 minutes before giving it a good stir.
10. Transfer to clean jars and then seal them using a water bath canning kit.

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If you prefer a finer cut marmalade, try this lime marmalade recipe, where the limes are sliced before boiling in water, yielding finer slivers of rind, instead of boiling the whole fruit, then slicing, yielding a more rustic marmalade.

Special equipment for making marmalade at home

I highly recommend investing in a canning kit made up of the smaller tools you will need in order to properly seal your jars, including a magnet to transfer the clean lids to the jars to avoid contamination, as well as a headspace measuring tool to make it easier to verify that you are filling the jars correctly, and a non-reactive funnel that will help you fill the jars without spilling and without dirtying the edges (which would ruin the seal!).

The kit should also come with jar lifters which are so helpful when moving the jars in and out of the water bath! You will also need a big pot preferably with a rack, like this one on Amazon, in order to boil the jars of marmalade for 10 minutes.

In order to achieve the perfect texture, it's very important to boil marmalade just enough so that it is thick, but not so much that the peel becomes chewy. A thermometer like a fast-reading Thermapen helps judge how far along you are in the cooking process and works perfectly with this recipe and method. The Thermapen is what I use. For a hands-free setup, a probe thermometer with a longer cable like the Thermoworks Dot would be better because then you don't have to hold it with your hands, which would be much less dangerous to use than my hand-held setup.

This recipe works with most citrus fruit, and you can see I've used it to make three fruit marmalade and orange marmalade.

Cookbooks on Preserves

If you are interested in simple recipes and techniques for making preserves, like this marmalade, check out Camilla Wynne's books on preserving:

• Preservation Society Home Preserves (available on Amazon in English), and it's also in her book Les Conserves Selon Camilla (available on Amazon in French)
• Jam Bakes (available on Amazon), which is dedicated to making preserves and baking with them too!

I used both these books to research this recipe and follow Camilla Wynne's methods closely as she taught me how to make Seville orange marmalade years ago. Highly recommend!

What to serve it with

Grapefruit marmalade is bittersweet so it's important to serve it with enriched breads, like this easy brioche or even homemade croissants.

For this method, you do not need to boil the seeds in the pot with the marmalade. This marmalade recipe will set properly if you follow the proportions as written and boil the marmalade to the right temperature.