It’s citrus season, at least for a little while longer, and this is the best time of year to preserve those bright flavors for year-round use.
Back in the day, northern families would get together to order citrus in the winter months, getting it by the truckload for preservation. There’s a local food coop not too far from here that started around 100 years ago, with a few dozen families coming together simply to buy citrus each winter.
Now, they’re a large grocery chain, but they still sell citrus by the case each winter to honor their founders. Bringing fresh citrus in each winter has been important for generations, and there’s a reason Laura Ingalls Wilder talks about the magic of getting an orange in her stocking each year.
Citrus really can brighten the darkest part of the year, and preserving it can let you enjoy it year-round (without breaking the bank).
A while back, I wrote a guide to preserving lemons for my sister, who was at the time buried in fresh lemons. Anyone who has a lemon tree knows just how prolific they can be.
The thing is, just about any preservation method that works for lemons also works with other citrus. Anything you can make with lemons you can also make with oranges, limes, grapefruits, tangerines…the list goes on.
Read More: 20+ Ways to Preserve Lemons (& Other Citrus)
Still, if you are looking for variety specific preservation recipes…I’ve got you covered. Here are my favorite preservation recipes for oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit and other citrus:
Oranges
Orange Marmalade (Lower Sugar Recipe)
Lemons
Canning Lemons (3 Ways)
Salt Preserved Lemons (Lemon Confit)
Limoncello (Lemon Liqueur)
Limes
Grapefruit
Other Citrus
Things You Might Need This Week
Still need more citrus ideas?
Homemade Citrus Seed Pectin (For Canning)
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Things I’m Loving
This pantry tour by Little Mountain Ranch is a food preserver’s dream come true!
If you’re missing those bright fruits this time of year, Tropical Fruit Box has some great options for brightening up your table. We do homegrown as much as possible, but we’ve got a few winter birthdays in the household that we celebrate with extra special treats like these.
What are you harvesting, preserving, building, or exploring on your homestead this week? I’d love to hear about it!
Leave me a note in the comments…
Until Next Time,
Ashley at Practical Self Reliance
Last fall I bought a steam juicer based on you mentioning it a few times in your site. I finally pulled it out yesterday and WOW is it ever easy to use and so clean compared to running fruit through a traditional electric juicer. Easily the best investment I've made since getting a pressure canner. I had about 30-40 pounds of tart cherries in my freezer and in just a few short hours I had a little over three gallons of juice and absolutely no mess in the kitchen -- most of the juice I've used to start batches of cherry wine.
That brings me to my questions, which are about sugar in wine!
When I made gallon-size batches of dandelion wine and rhubarb wine, using recipes on your site, they were great but kinda sweet. When I remade them as five gallon batches -- and carefully multiplying everything by five -- the wines were much dryer. Theoretically it should be the same sweetness, right? Do you maybe know why this might be the case?
On a semi related topic, this summer I also made corn cob wine using a recipe from another site. It's good but overwhelmingly sweet. If I do another gallon of it this summer... do you think it's fine to scale back the sugar that the recipe calls for? I'm assuming so -- if the end product is super sweet, then the yeast isn't consuming all the sugar. Any tips for scaling back the sugar?
Hi Ashley,
I love the substack you have and all the great articles. Have you ever done an article on using a steam juicer? My husband and I very interested!
Ruth