The Practical Diabetic

I tried my hand at making marmalade with some surplus mandarins and it turned out really well so I thought I would blog about it.

Ingredients

• 800g of mandarins (about 12 for me)
• 45 mL lemon juice (1.5 oz)
• 800mL water (a little less than 1 quart)
• 1/2 tsp pure sucralose (roughly equivalent to 4 cups of sugar, adjust to taste or use your preferred sweetener equivalent to roughly 4 cups of sugar)
• Enough gelatine to set 1L (1 quart)

Instructions

• Scrub the mandarins to remove wax/dirt/etc.
• Simmer whole mandarins for 45 mins in the water
• Remove the mandarins from the water and put the water to the side
• Chop mandarins finely removing pips
• Add back to the water with the lemon juice, sucralose and gelatine
• Simmer (do not boil) and pick out any pips.
• While simmering sterilise your jars (this made enough marmalade for three jars for me) and then spoon in
• Put in the fridge to set (maybe a couple of hours)

What you will end up with is something that looks like this.

How Many Carbs?

Mandarins have around 2g of fiber and 11g of sugars. As fiber is, by definition, indigestible, I will exclude it in the calculations but feel free to do what works for you.

In total I used 12 mandarins.

Which means a total of 132g of sugars. Divided by three jars, that is 44g per jar. Assuming roughly 30 servings per jar we get about 1.5g of sugar per serving. In comparison, ‘normal’ jam has about 10g of sugar per serving.

Variations

While I used pure sucralose, you can use whatever sweetener you want. However, gelatine (or a similar thickener such as agar) will be needed as, without the four cups of sugar, the fruit pectin will not activate and you will end up with something with the consistency of apple sauce.

In terms of the citrus used, any should work of a similar total weight for the recipe. You may need to increase simmering time at the end to break down the pith for other citrus (mandarins typically only have a small amount of pith making this a quick recipe for them).