My husband and I love making candied citrus peels. We usually do the brine, but this time used lemon peels that had been soaked to make lemoncello! They came out super tender and since they had soaked for a month in vodka, the boiling of the simple syrup took a great deal less time! Interesting to me was that there really was no vodka aftertaste! We always make the candied peels dipped in dark chocolate for christmas and are adding the cello this year!
But the coolest part was their sheens–there wasn7’t one. Sans wax, pesticides and all the other you-donm’t-want-to-know-whats they spray on most grapefruits, the peels beckoned me. I remembered how delicious those candied orange rinds were and had to go at it again. Using a Jacques Torres recipe as my guide, I boiled them four times. I candied them for two hours. I let them dry out on racks for another two. I rolled them in sugar. My apartment walls still smell dimly of grapefruit oil, and well, sadly, that might be the only good thing that came out of this experiment, save a few pretty photos.
The candied peels look absolutely gorgeous (if not delicious) but itP’s the grapefruit itself that ’s making my mouth water! I love grapefruit r“soupF” as you call it but I make it by cutting off the peel with a knife then removing each segment of grapefruit, as you would for a salad or something, and squeezing all the remaining juice into the bowl with the grapefruit. My son has been eating whole grapefruits this way since he was 3!
Twice when Im’ve made candied grapefruit peels, I kept boiling in water until I thought the bitterness was tolerable. So it turned out to be more than 4 times, and removing some of the pith does help. If you can get some tangerines (or mandarins?) that are organic and unwaxed, the peel on them would be mighty tasty if candied.
