Red Onion Marmalade

Inspiration strikes at the oddest hours, causing another post within a day of the last…

Yesterday’s new years party was a potluck buffet affair for which I originally only planned to bring fairly simple quesadillas, but when a friend announced he would bring lamb patties and mushroom stew my condiment sense was tingling. I decided to make an onion marmalade.

The onion marmalade has been lurking at the back of my memory since I first had it with kangaroo fillet at an Australian restaurant here in Gothenburg (now sadly gone) so I looked up a few recipes with a fancy app which I won’t plug unless they pay me first.

Ingredients are fairly simple and obvious. Red onions, red wine (alcohol free cooking wine pictured), balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, salt, pepper. I’ve also chosen to add thyme and juniper berries to match it even better with mutton and mushrooms. Also taking the opportunity to show off my new Japanese knife.

This is really a recipe to go crazy with, spice-wise. All sorts of herbs would probably fit in there, including for example mint or sage. Cloves, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, mustard seeds or star anise are other possibilities. I chose, however, to keep it simple since this was the first time making the marmalade, with no time to try again.

I should probably mention though, that while I made it, I thought the marmalade would end up too sour for my intentions, so I added a quite liberal amount of gelling sugar, which also stops what little fluids are left at the end from being runny. One of the recipes I looked up also suggested substituting part of the wine for stock, making the marmalade more savory.

Another important ingredient is a bit of elbow grease and a sharp knife, since chopping a pound of onions finely and evenly isn’t always the best fun to have on a saturday afternoon. No one will blame you if you use machinery for this. The result will probably be better too.

Letting the onions sweat in a pan for some 10 minutes before adding everything else. Not sure if letting the onions caramelize would have improved the end product, but will try that next time. If you decide to try this at home, use a wider vessel than I did.

Let the concoction simmer with the lid off until it looks like marmalade. Mine took about 80 minutes to reach that stage. In my opinion it goes very well with both mutton patties and roast lamb, but I should have either crushed the juniper berries or added more of them. Adding more spices (and why not garlic) would move it from marmalade to chutney, I presume, but that could be worth a try. At the party we also found out that the marmalade goes well with cheese, but tend to overpower Brie and other milder types.

That’s it for today! Now I should go back to writing stuff that generates university degrees.