Traveling Through Toast (and Yuzu Marmalade)

As fellow smugglers of all sorts of condiments from foreign countries, when we saw this essay and Sparkling Yuzu Marmalade recipe in Andrea’s Substack, Wild Larder Journal, we knew we had to adapt it! —Team YOLO

It is a cold winter morning. I am upstate in our tiny farmhouse on the north slope of a mountain, where big fat snowflakes silently blanket the frozen ground. No one is up yet except the cat, and while I am physically in the upper-western Catskills, my spirit travels through toast.

I move around the kitchen, reach for the salt, and stop to clip a small piece of oregano from the dried bundle hanging near the stove. As I do so, I am thinking about the market in Catania and the blinding salty limestone cliffs of the Scala de Turchi. I generously smear my toast with local Jersey butter, sparkly citrus marmalade, pungent dried Sicilian oregano, and fleur de sel from the salt flats of Trapani.

Toast is the perfect talisman to carry collected flavors and memories from afar. It is a humble partner waiting for me to unload my heavy suitcase, filled with anchovies and astrattu (tomato purée) from Sicily, honey from a convent in France, a dusting of powdered bottarga from the shop near the fish market in Venice, pickled kritamo (sea fennel) from Ischia, and rose petal and almond spoon sweets from Andros. These condiments may be small, but are big in flavor and easily tucked away in luggage bound for home.

The salt and oregano I sprinkle on my toast are comestibles collected from a recent trip to Sicily; in that regard, this small meal becomes much more than a slice of bread—it’s an adventure and an invitation to time travel. Toast is not a recipe. It’s more of an instinct, hands reaching for a serrated knife, a quick cut, edges browned to just crispy, center soft. Slather it with a smear of buttercup-yellow, softened salty butter. Eat it just like that, or dress it up as above. Toast is comforting and rich with memories. As I bite into it, a drip of butter hits the table. The flavor profile is so ridiculously good. I start to dream about other ways to use it. Just like that, inspiration comes and a flavor profile is born, all from a distant memory of a blinding hot summer day, the mountain breeze densely fragrant with wild herbs, and the salty sea.

RECIPE: SPARKLY YUZU MARMALADE

I started making marmalade in the late winter of 2020. It comforted me to have the house filled with the beautiful smell of citrus. The windows were all steamy, and in the end, I had glistening jars of marmalade to share with family and friends. The taste of it made me think of my great-grandmother and her love for lemons.

Since then, I’ve made many kinds of marmalade with all types of citrus, including everything from yuzu to oroblanco, Meyer lemon, calamansi, and limequat. When I travel, I am looking always looking for citrus. It goes back to being an exchange student in Italy and seeing for the first time the Api trucks piled with lemons from the Amalfi Coast to Puglia. No winter is complete without friends from California sending boxes of citrus from their backyard. It’s the one thing that makes me jealous of Californians.

I’ve made this marmalade so often that I stopped following any recipe and went on intuition. When a friend asked me for my recipe earlier this winter, I couldn’t tell her, because it was all in my head. So, I made a small batch of marmalade to work out the ratios; this is the recipe below. There are as many ways to make marmalade as roast a chicken. I am using a whole fruit method here, because it’s quick; other methods involve soaking the rinds overnight to four or five days! Some marmalade recipes will have you peel the rind and supreme the fruit (removing the peel/pith and segmenting it). Yuzu benefits from the whole-fruit method because they are full of seeds and don’t have an abundance of juice or flesh to supreme. If you decide to experiment with another citrus, feel free to supreme them and soak the rind for days and days, if that’s your thing. Here in New York, we are fortunate to find many kinds of citrus becoming increasingly popular in mainstream grocery stores, such as Whole Foods and Wegmans, where I saw piles of yuzu in November and early December. If you are looking for a specific citrus you can’t find in your area, I’ve added links at the bottom to farms I’ve worked with. I hope this inspires you to make your sparkly jars of marmalade.

INGREDIENTS
2 pounds yuzu fruit, approx 5 cups rind
2 teaspoons pink Himalayan salt or sea salt
4 cups sugar
4 cups poaching water (see directions below), plus 4 cups fresh water
3 tablespoons ume plum vinegar
Juice of 4-5 lemons, about 1 cup juice

METHOD

Stick a couple of small plates in the freezer before beginning this project. You will use them later and want them to be super cold. Wash the fruit. Sterilize jars in boiling water.
Fill a large stock pot with water about ¾ full and add the two teaspoons of salt. Add the whole yuzu fruits to the pot. The salt helps to soften the skin and adds to the umami-ness of the marmalade. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat to a bare simmer until soft. You are essentially poaching the fruit. You want to pierce the skin with a fork easily. If it is still tough, cook until soft. This can take anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half.
Remove from heat. With a slotted spoon, transfer the citrus to a bowl to cool. Save the poaching water. As the citrus cools, it will look shrunken from all sides. This is normal. Line a colander with a piece of cheesecloth, set the colander inside another bowl, and set it aside.
When the citrus is cool enough to handle, cut it in half and scoop out the insides—the flesh and pits—into the colander lined with cheesecloth). Any juice will be caught in the bowl below.
Once you have scooped out all the seeds and flesh of the yuzu, tie the cheesecloth into a bundle so the seeds can’t escape. (It helps if you use a new cheesecloth for this project.)
Now, you are ready to cut your citrus into thin strips. Cut each round into quarters using a sharp knife, then cut thin strips. This is where the hand of the maker comes in. You can cut the rind as thin or thick as you want; it depends on how you prefer your marmalade. Set the rinds aside in a large bottomed stock pot or a copper jam pan.
Once the strips of rind are placed in the pot, add 4 cups of poaching liquid and 4 cups of fresh water to the rinds. Tuck the bag of flesh and pips into the pot, and boil for about an hour until the liquid is visibly reduced by half.
Remove from the heat; remove the muslin or cheesecloth and set it in a bowl to cool. Once cool enough to handle, squeeze the bag of flesh and pips to remove as much pectin as possible into the bowl through the muslin; it will be thick and dense. Make sure to keep it tied up so no pips escape.
Add the pectin, sugar, umeboshi plum vinegar, and 3/4 cup lemon juice to the cooked rinds. The umeboshi vinegar is my secret umami for all of my marmalades. It adds a slight saltiness and bitterness and is perfectly paired with the sweet-sour of the citrus.
Turn heat to medium and boil for a minute or two, stirring until all the sugar is dissolved. Reduce the heat to a bare simmer for about an hour.
Marmalade set times are fussy, so use your eyes, intuition, and hands to check when your marmalade is ready. First, watch for the bubbles to get slow and thick; people often say it is like bubbling crude oil, but who has a reference for that? I recently read that Alison Roman likens marmalade readiness in bubbles to slow-blinking fish eyes; this I understand. As soon as the bubbles start changing, grab your thermometer and see where you are for temperature. Add the last 1/4 cup of lemon juice and stir in. Most recipes say the marmalade setting time is 220, but I like my marmalade a little runny. My sweet spot for marmalade is around 218 degrees, but this produces a pretty runny result. (I add it to yogurt, ice cream, labneh, or on top of my favorite cheesecake or piece of toast; these benefit from a looser set.) If you want a thicker marmalade, take it to 220 and test it as soon as it reaches that point. Take out your frozen plate, put a small spoonful on it, and let it cool for a minute. Smear the marmalade with a spoon through the center; if it pools quickly back together, it needs more cooking time; if it stays somewhat separated, it is ready. This may seem a little daunting, but trust me, once you do it, you’ll understand.
When the marmalade is ready, add the juice of 1 lemon and let it cool for ten or fifteen minutes before filling the sterilized jars and covering them with lids. You can store the marmalade in your fridge or hot-water bath can (see link below). If you store them in your refrigerator, tell your friends to refrigerate when you give them away. If you hot-water bath the jars, they will be shelf-stable and don’t need to be refrigerated until opened.