First Orange. 8″ x 8″ watercolor pencil and gouache. Sharyn Dimmick
I ate my first orange of the season this morning, the first one I’ve had since March. The fruit plate at breakfast In New Mexico has been full of melons: I know they can’t be seasonal — not watermelon anyway. Today I turned first to the stewed prunes. I had two, but they were cold. Then I saw oranges in the fruit bowl and went up to investigate. The first orange was large. sporting a blue and white label: I squinted and read “Australia.” I put it back, but now I wanted an orange. I found a small one with no sticker. I took it, hoping it had been trucked no further than California where I live, two states away.
Taking it back to the table I peeled it with my fingernails and then used a knife to get under the thick white pith, losing a little juice as the knife pierced the flesh. Wiping my hands on my napkin, I removed the navel and separated the first segment from the broken halves.
It tasted like sunshine: winter sunshine — a little sweet, acid, radiant in my mouth. I understood for the first time how my mother felt in Canada and Illinois when she got an orange in her Christmas stocking: how wonderful it must have tasted in the dead of winter when they were rare.
Mom has never lost her taste for oranges. We argue about them. She wants them in August and September when it is not orange season. I remind her that in January, February and March we will be inundated with citrus: I spend March making tangerine curd to eat on angel food cake, devising citrus dressings for salads, drying and candying citrus peels. We make Swedish rye bread in the winter with orange zest and fresh juice.
When Mom moved to California in 1944 she said you could buy oranges everywhere: from roadside stands, from trucks on San Pablo Avenue. She bought an orange juicer — not an electric thing, but a press with a screen and long handles: you bring the handles together and squeeze halved oranges or lemons between metal plates. The screen catches the seeds and the juice falls into a reservoir below with a pouring spout. It does not work well if you have removed the peel for zest or candying — it was designed for halved citrus, squeezed whole.
I have never been partial to the standard American trio: apples, oranges and bananas, sitting on the counter year-round and incorporated into every fruit salad and lunch box. I eat apples in season, drying them for the winter and giving them up when they come from cold storage. I like oranges when I am hiking and fresh food is scarce, or when, like this morning, I take a walk in thawing snow: I walked to town to get a coffee, walked back in time for morning meditation, craved fruit at breakfast. The orange tasted like lost gold recovered, what explorers had been looking for as they sailed around the world.
Oh, you’ll want a recipe. Alright. This is how to candy citrus peel: orange, lime, tangerine, lemon, or grapefruit. I started doing this when I got interested in using the whole fruit: if I’m not zesting citrus fruit there is all of that peel left over — why not turn it into winter sweets? Home-candied peel bears no resemblance to that nasty glaceed mixed fruit you find in the store. I chop candied peel into breakfast muffins, use it in orange French toast, or eat it straight out of the jar when there are no sweets in the house and I want a little something. Sometimes I save mixed citrus peels in a bag in the freezer: when I have a lot, I take them out and candy them all at once. It’s best to use organically-grown fruit for edible peel, but if you only have commercially-grown citrus available, be sure to wash it with dishwashing liquid and water, rinse it and dry it before peeling so that you are not ingesting any unwanted chemicals.
Here’s what you do. Peel a lot of citrus fruit or take your bag of saved peels from the freezer. You can candy several types at once — you don’t need to separate them. If you are peeling fresh fruit, score the peel into quarters with a knife: this makes it easier to peel.
Place your peels in a large saucepan of cold water: you want 2 cups of water per eight limes or lemons, six tangerines or oranges, or three grapefruit. Bring peels to rolling boil. Drain them. Start again with cold water. Repeat. The thicker the peel, the more times you should blanch it — grapefruit peel takes at least four times,
Cool the peels and scrape the white pith from them with a knife or the side of a spoon, being careful not to break the peel — if it breaks, you can’t brag about it, but it is no tragedy — you’ll just have some smaller pieces. Cut the peels into strips.
Now return the peels to your saucepan with equal amounts of sugar and water — say 2 cups each. Bring to a simmer and cook without stirring until peel is translucent. This takes about an hour. If you are a thermometer-wielding type. Alice Medrich says to get the syrup to between 220 and 222 degrees.
Remove peel with slotted spoon and cool in a single layer on a rack over a baking sheet (the peel will drip for awhile). We set ours in our oven overnight. When peel is dry, dredge it in sugar and store it in sugar in a glass jar in your refrigerator. If you make enough it will last you until citrus comes in again the following year. It makes great gifts, too. People have been known to dip it in chocolate or caramel.
thekalechronicles 
From now on I’m saving my peels!! Being from the “orange” state of Florida there’s plenty around but I particularly like to find those that are growing wild or in someone’s yard. There’s no comparison to a fresh picked orange!
Oh, yeah, Lynda. I forgot to mention that you should use organically grown fruit or wash commercially-grown fruit carefully with dishwashing liquid and water, rinse and dry: this removes some of the orange oils, but it also removes any chemicals lurking on the skin. Home-grown fruit is best for lucky people like you in orange-growing regions.
I find this quite interesting, having spent most of my adult life in Ohio, where apples and berries tend to be the locally grown fresh fruit. I have never tasted a fresh picked orange and it is hard to imagine having so much fresh citrus that one would have to think up ways to use it all. It is good to know peels can be frozen until there is enough to candy.
Once the tangerines get going (usually this month) we get perhaps three pounds a week from the farm. By the time they stop coming in March we have had our fill of them and then some, but then they are gone for another year. We try to make every orange thing we like when the oranges are here.
Backyard orchard: we now have 2 varieties of baby mandarin trees and 2 varieties of orange. They take a long time to establish, and it’s on the cold side up here for oranges. The old lime tree bears copiously this time of year, and everything formerly lemon in our menu becomes lime! Sounds like the peels idea might be a good one. We’ll plant a dwarf Meyer’s lemon soon.
For me, lemon is the most versatile of all citrus, and Meyer lemons are great. Lime is useful in Thai and Mexican food especially. Peels are good in sweets.
i did it once with Buddha’s hand citron. You were supposed to dip them in chocolate, but they were so good, they never got that far.
I would try it if you made it (and I was there to get some). Commercial candied fruit turned me against citron.
be fun to try quartered kumquats.
You are the kumquat queen. You and Patience are the ones I know who like to eat them.
[…] gathering but just had enough time to slice up some homemade candied orange and lemon citrus peel (Thank you Sharyn at The Kale Chronicles for the how to!) in long thin strips to create my very own sunburst effect, adding a trio of star anise (one of the […]