Tangerines are tasty, sweet and sour fruits from the genus citrus. Most often, they are consumed fresh, but they can be used to prepare wonderful preparations, for example, jam.
There are several options for preparing tangerine preserves. For example, here's how to cook a sweet delicacy from whole fruits. For this jam, a variety of mandarins with small fruits is used, and the mandarins must not be ripe enough. For harvesting, only perfectly healthy and intact fruits should be selected.
Before cooking the jam, the fruits must be prepared. Each tangerine needs to pierce the peel in diameter, moving along the lobules. Punctures should be carried out with a wooden stick, and not with a knife or fork, since vitamin C is destroyed from contact with the metal . After that, we heat enough water to immerse the tangerines and blanch the fruits at a temperature close to boiling (90-95 degrees) , blanching time is 15 minutes. After that we take out the tangerines, and soak them in cold water for a day.
Now you need to prepare the syrup at the rate of a liter of water per kilogram of granulated sugar. Pour the tangerines with hot syrup (we will need one and a half liters of syrup per kilogram of citrus fruits) and boil the tangerine jam for five minutes. Then remove the dishes from the stove and hold for 12 hours. This must be done three times, adding 250 grams of granulated sugar per kilogram of tangerines to the jam before each boiling.
Then you need to remove the tangerines from the syrup with a slotted spoon and arrange them in clean jars. Boil the syrup to the desired density and pour hotly into jars of tangerines. If tangerine jam is planned to be stored, then the jars need to be sterilized. Small half-liter jars are enough to keep in boiling water for half an hour, liter - at least fifty minutes. Banks removed from the sterilizer immediately roll up.
If the fruits are large, then it is better to cook mandarin jam, dividing the fruits into halves. You need to prepare the fruits for this cooking method in the same way, that is, chop it first, then blanch and soak in cold water. Then cut the fruits into halves, put them in a bowl for cooking jam and pour hot syrup, which should be prepared from a liter of water and 2350 grams of sugar. Leave to infuse for 8 hours. Cook in four doses for 10 minutes, making eight-hour breaks. Pour hot jam into sterile jars and immediately roll up.
You can also make jam from tangerines with the zest removed, in which case the taste will turn out to be less tart. The zest must be carefully removed from the fruit with a sharp knife and soak the tangerines in cold water for a day. Chopped soaked fruits in the same way as when preparing a piece of mandarin jam, the recipe of which is given above. Then proceed to blanching. To do this, the fruits should be boiled for five minutes three times, each time, after extracting from boiling water, immersing them in cold water. Then disassemble the tangerines into slices, extract the seeds, pour the syrup. The proportions in the preparation of this jam are as follows: per kilogram of tangerines, a liter of water and a kilogram of sugar. Boil the jam for five minutes, then leave to cool. Then, drain the syrup, boil it for about fifteen minutes and pour the slices again. Such an operation should be carried out two more times. Pack the cooked jam in jars.
You can cook tangerine jam using only tangerine peels. To do this, you need to collect a kilogram of fresh tangerine peels and soak them for a day in water (cold). During soaking, change the water at least three times. Then cut the crusts with “noodles” and blanch them while boiling for 5 minutes. Drain the broth, saving it for cooking syrup. We will cook the syrup from two and a half glasses of broth left over from blanching and one and a half kilograms of sugar. Dip the prepared crusts into the syrup and cook the jam in one step. When it is almost ready, add 20 grams of fresh tangerine zest and 2 grams of citric acid per kilogram of jam for flavor. You can use not crystalline citric acid, but the juice of fresh lemon, so it will be even more aromatic.