June Taylor Seville Orange Marmalade
8 oz - Berkeley, CA
This year June has hooked up with an organic farmer with a substantial crop of quality organic Seville oranges. Seville oranges are a small oranges with a bitter rind and a highly acidic pulp. A regular flavor bomb that's virtually inedible to the modern palate, but it has an intense orange flavor. This is one of finest examples of artisan created products we carry.
The variety was named for the region of Spain where they have grown in abundance for over a thousand years. It has a dark color and this may lead you to think that it will have a "cooked" flavor, but nothing could be farther than the truth. The set is soft to firm and the flavor is explosive with the brightest orange flavor I've ever tasted in a marmalade, and a the pleasant orange tang lingers on the palate. It is also perfect for producing potent orange liqueurs like Cointreau, Curacao and Grand Marinier, and of course the most prized marmalade of all.
Serving Suggestions
The perfect thing for afternoon tea, and it may prove to be your favorite breakfast preserves as well. Makes a great glaze for meat or fish.
About the Producer
For June, everything starts with the fruit, or more accurately, fruits: she uses 50 to 60 different varieties in creating her products! Her fruit is organic, nearly all grown locally (in California), and she is passionate about high quality and excellent flavor, so if a particular fruit is having a substandard year, she will pass on it that season and try something else.
June has a relationship of trust with the farmers who produce fruit for her, and they understand her rigorous quality standards. She insists on small, completely hand-produced batches of her products. The process is involved and labor-intensive, but once you've tasted her preserves and marmalades, you may wonder why anyone does it differently. Even the lovely letterpress labels for her jars are applied by hand.
June specializes in heirloom and other forgotten fruits, those ignored by companies, large and small, whose product profiles are set in stone. The fruit is hand-cut and then cooked, quickly, to maintain maximum flavor. June adds only minimal amounts of sugar and only the fruit's natural pectin, basing her methods not on a formula but on taste and flavor, and so each batch is different. She would rather produce a soft-set marmalade in which the fruit shines through than meet an industrial, artificial expectation of how stiff it should be.
