Raise your hand if you usually just throw your orange peels away. Who doesn't? It's not like you could eat them. Or is it? When I prepared Sicilian orange and fennel salad I used some nice Spanish untreated oranges. Throwing away the peels seemed a waste. I could have dried them but I still have a big jar of this stuff which I seldom use. And then, as in every classic cartoon, the little light bulb turned on. Candied orange peel! That's what I would do.
Only, I didn't feel like using some of the lengthy procedures I had read about in a few Italian books. Some take days and I didn't want to start such a long "project". After some browsing through my cookbooks I decided to go for relatively quick method described in Larousse Gastronomique. Candying fruit quickly has its downsides. You have to use quite a bit of heat and the fruit will inevitably a cooked taste: not that bad for citrus peel, but something I would avoid for other fruits. A slow process can give absolutely fantastic results. My favourite candied fruits, produced in Genova, Italy, by Romanengo and tasting incredibly like fresh ripe fruit, are produced, according to some, with a process that doesn't involve any heating of the fruit. But you know, sometimes I'm just lazy so I went for the quick way :-).
The candying process itself is quite easy:
- The peel of the orange is scrubbed till no white pith remains. This has the function of removing the bitter flavour. In other recipes the peels are blanched twice for the same reason. I scrubbed quite a bit but I still had a wee bit of pith sticking to my peels. In the end it gave only a faint bitter not, not unpleasant in contrast to the sweetness of the finished peels. Once scrubbed I cut the peels into strips.
- For each orange I used 250 ml water (8.5 fl oz) and 125 g (4.4 oz) sugar. Once this sirup boiled I added the peels and let the whole simmer uncovered till the liquid was reduced by 3/4 (about 4-5 hours). I then turned off the heat and let cool.
- Once cool one could pass to the next step straight away. I didn't have any time (it was quite late) so I just left everything in the closed pot till the next evening. With such a high sugar concentration (plus the hours of simmering) there's practically no risk of any bugs growing in there. Now comes the sticky part: drain the peels through a colander till most of the sirup is eliminated. Have fun washing off the sticky stuff from your pot/sink/etc :-). Once finished, toss the peels with confectioners sugar till nicely coated. The recipe at this point tells you to dry the peels under the broiler/grill. I found this a bit too hot and got also a bit scared that I would end up with burned peels so I opted for about 1 hour at 120C/250F. Once cool (and dry) I stored my peels in a glass jar. They keep for a very long time.
And once you have candied orange peels what better than chocolate covered ones? To do this I tempered some dark chocolate as described here and used it to coat some of the peels (plus a few grapes that were just standing there). The last peels I coated didn't look as nice as the first ones as I worked too slow and so the chocolate got a bit too cold and instead of a nice smooth chocolate surface I got a few cocoa butter crystals showing up. Doesn't make them any less tasty though!
Wow! The chocolate covered fruit looks delish Alberto. How did the grapes taste, I've never had that combo before.
Here's a funny coincidence, I just used the peel of an orange in a recipe too! Not the zest but thick chunks of the rind.
Posted by: Deb | March 02, 2004 at 05:42 PM
The grapes tasted quite nice, both refreshing and, well, nicely of chocolate although not as nice as chocolate covered strawberries would have...but it's not strawberry season yet.
For some starnge reason there seems to be, here in Germany, an abbundance of chocolate covered fruit (any kind you might think of) market stalls. That's where I first saw the chocolate covered grapes.
Posted by: Alberto | March 03, 2004 at 10:13 AM
What a great idea! Now I want to go get oranges just so I can candy the peels.
Posted by: ladygoat | March 03, 2004 at 03:17 PM
I will be trying this for sure. wow!
Posted by: Donna | March 03, 2004 at 03:44 PM
got dried orange peels as snacks in SE asia that has been sugar coated with plum powder. nice.
u could also dry the peels in the sun or oven (low heat) and then put it into a soy soup with pork. nice flavour to it. :)
Posted by: Wena | March 03, 2004 at 05:05 PM
ladygoat: that would be very bad for your teeth ;-)), and you would also lose all that nice vitamin C! On the other hand... just enjoy :-)
Donna: have fun!
Wena: thanks for the pork soup tip, maybe I'll manage to slowly go through my big jar full of dry orange peel.
Posted by: Alberto | March 04, 2004 at 10:13 AM
"Only, I didn't feel like using some of the lengthy procedures I had read about in a few Italian books. Some take days and I didn't want to start such a long "project"."
Would you be willing to post some of these lengthy recipe's or atleast give the titles of the books in wich you found them.
Thank you much
Posted by: j. varekamp | January 14, 2006 at 11:21 PM
I'm afraid the titles of the books escape me at the moment since the books I was refering to are still in a box in Italy, waitng for the day I have enough shelf-space to move the rest of my Italian books. I can give you a rough outline of the procedure though. The whole process takes about 8-10 days and starts with thick orange skins, cut into strips, and a syrup similar to the one above, whch you should measure. The syrup is brought to a boil, peels are added and the whole simmers for 30 minutes and then cools in a dry cool place for two days. After two days the syrup is poured off and measured again: some of it will be missing and the measure should be topped off with sugar. The syrup is boiled till the new sugar is dissolved and then poured on the peels once more. This will be repeated another 3-4 times, every two days. I fear that at a certain point dissolving new sugar might become difficult, but having never tried the method myself, I might be wrong. Should anyone try this one, I'd be curious to know how things went.
Posted by: Alberto | January 26, 2006 at 11:22 PM
Can you help me?? I've been looking for a recipe I heard about for Orange peels. It consists of covering them in sugar and putting them in the freezer or frig. I know there has to be more to it then that. If you know anything please let me know. Thank you.
Posted by: Jeanie Forsyth | April 16, 2006 at 06:20 PM
could you please elaborate on the scrubbing part? What did you scrub the pith off with? How thick were your peels when you were done? What type of oranges did you use?
thanks,
Anu
Posted by: Anu | June 05, 2006 at 08:09 PM
Anu,
I scrubbed the pith with a sharp pairing knife and once finished the peels were maybe 2 mm thick (just less than 1/10 of an inch). It is quite a while ago, but I seem to remember that I used some organic navelina oranges from Spain.
Posted by: Alberto | June 05, 2006 at 11:57 PM