My first experiment - Mandarin Orange Jam

Last summer, I watched an episode of "Jamie at Home" and he made a dessert with a quick strawberry jam. I was intrigued by the jam, and decided I wanted to try to make it. [Find the original recipe here.] It was super easy and it came out great! It was almost as good as my grandmother's refrigerator jam that she used to make - almost.

I have been wanting to try to make it again with some other fruit, but the opportunity did not arise until recently. I had bought a bag of Cuties on sale and was not getting through them as fast as I had planned. I wanted to use them up before they went bad and the recipe jumped into my head. So, I tried to make the same quick jam with the mandarin oranges.

It is an easy recipe.
2 Pounds of fruit
1/2 cup of sugar

Mix together with your hands until the sugar is incorporated into the juice. Then bring to a boil and cook on medium heat for 25 - 30 minutes. Every 5 minutes, skim the foam off the top. When it is done, it can be canned in a jar that has been boiled in hot water and kept in the fridge for a few weeks.

Now I hate to start this off with a fail, but I should have known early on, when I was not getting a foam on the fruit, that maybe mandarin oranges were not a good match for this recipe. I am sure there is a good reason (too much acid, wrong kind of fruit, whatever) but the fact remains that this ended up burning and the texture and taste was off. I may have had heat up a little high, but I think the burning of the fruit was the least of my problems.

A learning experience, to be sure. I will try this again as soon as I can find some good berries. I am going to avoid citrus in the future!

Every experiment, even those in cooking, starts out with a hypothesis - that the end product will be edible and good - and like every experiment, it will either confirm or deny the hypothesis. Sometimes the hypothesis is wrong. That is how we learn. Let's hope next time, we prove the hypothesis.