Orchard Lane Orange Marmalade - a bottle of pure goodness

Thank you for purchasing a bottle of our Orange Marmalade. What you hold in your hand is a labour of love! We will tell you why.

A marmalade is a fruit preserve that uses the skin of the fruit as well as the pulp. We make our orange marmalade from valencia citrus oranges that are grown in South Africa or Egypt. 

Each orange is washed thoroughly, then the skin is peeled manually. After that , the white pith of the fruit is removed and discarded as this lends an extreme bitter taste. 

Finally the pulp is primed carefully. Priming an orange involves a specialized way to slice it, so that the individual flanks get separated and we can remove the tough skin around each. During this process the seeds are also removed. The core of the orange contains a lot of natural pectin and it is cold pressed to extract the pectin-rich juice. And as if this was not enough, the peel is then handed to our chopping experts who are skilled to cut it into very fine slivers of lovely orange peel which will give the marmalade a unique citrusy flavour.  This is as much a time consuming process as a tedious one. But you are the one who can tell us if it is worth it. 

Most of the vitamin C of the fruit resides in its peel and by making marmalades we ensure we capture all the nutrients in our bottle of marmalade. 

This batch of marmalade was made on 23 July 2019. A fairly dry monsoon morning, with Orchard Lane women bantering over piles of oranges before them. At this time of the year, the orange supply from South Africa is low, and this is when egyptian oranges take over. The egyptian orange is a tad smaller than the Sough African one and with a tougher skin that gives us more flavour for sure, but this means we need a plenty more oranges to get the same juice.