Greek orange marmalade dessert

If you have ever been to Greece, you will have seen there are thousands of ‘wild’ orange trees lining the streets.

Orange trees in Athens. Pic: Andrew Gustar

I love walking through Athens in spring, when the trees let their delicious floral scent fill the air when it’s blossom time. When the fruit ripens, the trees are replete with juicy-looking oranges. 

But while you can pluck these oranges and take what you want for free, you’d be laughed out of town if you tried to snack on one, as the fruit is so bitter it’s a very unpleasant eating experience.

However, while you cannot eat these the normal way, many Greeks use this bitter fruit to make a sweet called ‘glyko tou koutaliou’. The addition of sugar and honey in a preserving process cuts through the bitterness to create a nice marmalade-type of dessert.

You can use normal oranges (such as navel oranges) but many people prefer the Seville or Asian oranges as otherwise the sweet can be, well, too sweet.

To make roughly 1 kilogram of this (approximately two average-sized mason jars):

You will need:

• Oranges (normal 'Navel' oranges from a shop or, if you have access to them, the free, bitter kind). You will need 8 to 10, depending on the size.
• 1kg of caster sugar (yes, I know it's a lot. Bear with me).
• 4-5 tablespoons of Thyme honey OR 3-4 tablespoons of lemon juice to taste.

How to:

• Wash the oranges well if they’re shop-bought, especially if they are waxy. It’s worth grating the outside layer a little, as it helps to unlock the zest.
• Put the oranges whole and unpeeled into a large pot and cover them completely with lots of water, then bring these to the boil. Let them stay on the boil for 5 to 10 minutes (depending on how hard the oranges were in the first place).
• Drain the water and leave the fruit to cool down, because once cooled, you can slice into thick wedges and, after removing the creamy white pith, throw the wedges into the pot again and cover with the sugar.
• Resist the temptation to add water. The aim is to reduce the sugar and juice of the oranges into a thick marmalade.
• Bring to the boil, keep on the boil for 10 minutes and remove to cool down. Cover and leave for a day.
• The next day, bring the sticky mixture back to the boil, testing to see if the mixture is too sweet or too bitter. If it is too bitter, add the honey; if too sweet, add a few tablespoons of lemon juice.
• Boil for 10 minutes and scoop into your mason jars.

Greeks often eat this as a little treat, for example when they come home from school and want a light treat, or instead of cake for dessert.

George’s family usually give us several jars of this to take back to the UK with us but, as we rarely eat this sort of thing it has been left lying in the fridge. And as we are getting ready to head back to Athens we need to make room for more.

So I cheated with ready-made shortcrust pastry (with a little baby to look after I’m all about saving time) and made it into a tart. I blind-baked the pastry base first for about 20 minutes on 160 (find out how to blind bake here), then added a jar of the glyko to fill it up to the top of the crust, then baked again for 30 minutes on 160 (I have a fan-assisted oven which gets very hot so I usually take the heat down a notch from most recipes).

Oh it ain't pretty but it tastes pretty darn great! 

Basically, with the marmalade being made by our family and the pastry coming out of a shop, the whole thing took hardly any time to prepare or bake, which is great when it comes to fitting in dessert-making around feeding and entertaining a five-month-old baby!

Now although it wasn't elegantly prepared (I'm sure you will make it look much better), it smelled so good that we became rather impatient. I suppose we could have left it to cool down completely but we are greedy and hungry so ate it when it was a decent temperature.

As the ‘marmalade’ that our family gave us was quite sweet, we topped it off with cool Greek yoghurt to cut through the sweetness, but if your pie is more bitter to the taste, some delicious honeycomb or vanilla ice-cream will do just nicely!