Good afternoon! Village affairs and worries at the end of summer and beginning of autumn did not leave any free time at all, and my Zen channel remained forgotten and abandoned for more than a month and a half. And today is a real autumn cold day, with light rain, wind and leaf fall. The weather has driven me under the roof. I turn on my beautiful electric fireplace and sit down at my laptop…

One of my latest kitchen feats is making homemade apple marmalade. It turned out very tasty!

Neighbors treated us to apples — a little overripe, crumbly. To be honest, I don’t like these. I need the apple to be crisp, juicy (we have our own varieties, and we gobbled up our apples very quickly). And these ones are like cotton wool … And they literally deteriorate before our eyes … I decided that they would be quite suitable for making marmalade. I’m a little «turned» on a healthy diet, I try not to eat sweets, but sometimes I just want to insanely! And this delicacy seems to me the most useful of all sweets.

Apple marmalade at home — recipe

Marmalade from apples was very tasty made by my grandmother, even when we lived in Azerbaijan. I decided to make a sweet according to her recipe. Made homemade apple marmalade for the first time. But everything turned out, the first pancake — not lumpy!

Homemade apple marmalade. Photo of the author. Homemade apple marmalade. Photo of the author.

1. Washed and cut the apples along with the skin. The cores, if they were clean, without worms and rotten, also put them in a saucepan. It is believed that it is in the peel and cores that the largest amount of pectin is contained, a substance that provides jelly and elasticity to marmalade.

2. I got about two kilograms of peeled apples. I put them in a stainless steel pan, poured about 130-150 ml of water into the pan and put it on a small fire (I have a gas stove).

In the process of preparing dinner, I stirred the apples from time to time. Soon they gave juice, softened. I let the apple mass boil over low heat under the lid for about 20 minutes, and turned it off.

3. The next morning, hastily rubbed the apple mass through a sieve. I have a great stainless steel sieve! I used to use honey, but washing it later is tormenting …

I poured only 200 g of sugar into the resulting puree and boiled (it boiled for 5-10 minutes, no more). I had no time to cook longer — I ran away to work.

4. After the service, I again put the applesauce to boil. This time I cooked it longer — about an hour. I didn’t just cook marmalade, along the way I managed to cook dinner and redo other household chores. But from time to time I stirred the apple mass — otherwise it burns. I did not cover it with a lid, because the whole point is to evaporate more moisture from the applesauce. Yes, I forgot to say, I added a third of a teaspoon of ground cinnamon to the apple mass. but this is not necessary, a matter of taste. For example, I really like the combination of cinnamon and apples.

The mass “spits” during boiling, so you need to be careful. When my brew began to spit very angrily and loudly, I turned it off.

5. I covered a large baking sheet with good baking paper and transferred the mass to a baking sheet. Smoothed out with a spoon. The layer turned out to be about 1.5 cm. I looked on the Internet, some people use dehydrators to make apple marmalade. I also have a dryer, but I still decided to cook marmalade in the oven.

I put the baking sheet in the oven, chose the baking mode from above and below with convection, set the temperature to 70 degrees. Of course, you can also do without convection, but it seems to me that things go faster with it … By the way, the door in the oven was not completely closed, but left a gap of about half a centimeter, placing a spoon under the door. The time was set to 2 hours. Grandmother dried marmalade, of course, in a gas oven, and it happened that she fried it a little. The kitchen appliances of those years were far from perfect and did not allow to accurately set the required temperature …

At 70 degrees, marmalade cannot burn, so you can safely forget about it for 2 hours and go about your business.

6. I dried apple marmalade for a total of 4 hours. After the first two-hour drying, I noticed that the surface of the delicacy had already dried up, as it should, and the bottom was too wet. I cut the marmalade into 4 pieces on a baking sheet and turned each piece individually and sent it to dry for another 2 hours. Let cool and cut into small pieces.

My grandmother, cutting, rolled each piece in powdered sugar. But I didn’t: extra sugar is useless.

Sweets can be helpful too. Homemade marmalade has a minimum of sugar. And no «yes». Photo of the author. Sweets can be helpful too. Homemade marmalade has a minimum of sugar. And no «yes». Photo of the author.

The taste of the marmalade turned out to be very bright, sweet and sour, not a bit sugary, a little harsh. We all enjoyed it very much.

They say you can store homemade marmalade for several months in the refrigerator. But ours lived only a day

Preparing natural homemade apple marmalade for a long time — three days. But it was somehow casual, in several stages, not difficult and not tiring. I plan to cook more. Perhaps I’ll mix peeled pine nuts into the marmalade mass before drying in the oven. Or chopped walnuts. As an option — nucleoli of sunflower seeds. Will it taste good?