Kitchen
Candied Orange Peel
Slow-simmered peel for the winter jar — for baking, for chocolate, for eating straight from the rack.
Every autumn, before the holiday baking starts, I fill the rack over the stove with orange peel. It takes a whole afternoon, but most of that is the pot doing the work while the kitchen slowly fills with the smell of oranges and sugar.
Shop-bought candied peel is usually hard and tastes of very little. Homemade is soft, glassy and properly bitter-sweet — closer to a sweet than an ingredient. It goes into honey cakes and stollen, gets dipped in dark chocolate for presents, and a few strips always disappear straight off the rack.
The syrup left at the end is a gift in itself: thin it with hot water for a winter cup, or stir it into the spiced rose hip cup.
Candied Orange Peel
You will need
To finish (optional)
Method
Score each orange into quarters from top to bottom, just through the peel, and pull the peel away in four pieces. Keep the fruit for eating.
Cut the peel into strips about 7 mm (¼ inch) wide. Leave the white pith on — it turns translucent and tender as it cooks.
Put the strips in a pan, cover with cold water and bring to the boil. Drain. Repeat twice more with fresh water each time. This takes away the harshest bitterness.
In the same pan, warm the sugar and water until the sugar dissolves. Add the peel and keep it at the barest simmer — just a few lazy bubbles — for 60 to 90 minutes, until the pith looks glassy and translucent.
Lift the strips out with a fork onto a wire rack set over a tray. Pour the remaining syrup into a clean jar.
Leave the peel to dry overnight, or up to a day, until it is tacky rather than wet.
Toss the strips in sugar, or dip one end in melted dark chocolate with a few flakes of salt. Store in an airtight jar.
Notes
Keeping: sugared peel keeps for months in a sealed jar in a cool cupboard. The syrup keeps in the fridge for a month.
Other citrus: grapefruit and lemon work the same way. Grapefruit may need a fourth blanching.
Too sticky? Leave it to dry longer, or warm it in the oven at its lowest setting for twenty minutes.