Candied Orange Peel – recipe mashup

A mashup, in music, is a mix of two songs. Like this one, which you should listen to as you read on.

A recipe mashup is a recipe that puts together many recipes.

What happened was that I bought oranges to make juice. The first day, I squeezed six. The second, six more. And I saw the peels. And I felt sad. All those peels, thrown.

What can you do with orange peels? Zest, sure, but how much zest can you use?

And then I thought of something that I absolutely hate: candied fruit. Of course! I could make candied orange peels! No matter that I didn’t like them…. boyfriend would eat them. For sure.

So I looked up some recipes, and found kazillions of recipes. I read them, read them again, then got up and made candied orange peel.

This, ladies and gentleman, is the one recipe mashup for Candied Orange Peel.

Get your orange peel. Let’s say you’re using two oranges. One of them, just clean of the pulp and slice. The other, clean of the pulp and grate with a knife to remove every single trace of white pith. I developed a technique that worked well: while holding the peel with one finger, I scraped with a sharp knife nearly horizontally.

Cut the de-pithed peels in tiiiiny julienned slices.

Next, boil some water. Drop the peels in, boil for 15 mins, strain the peels, throw the water and repeat. I saw recipes that called for only one boil and others that said three was the minimum, so I boiled them twice and it was absolutely fine.

So, after two boiling sessions that help reduce the sourness, it’s time to whip up some syrup!

I did this by putting an equal amount of water to white sugar. I maybe should have used a little less – the peels are a bit sweet now. I used a glass of sugar for a glass of water, let it boil, then added the peels and let them simmer for 30 minutes.

Once they had boiled for 30 minutes I wasn’t sure what to do. One recipe said to leave them in the syrup for a minimum of one hour, another said to take them out and roll them in sugar, a third wrote to take them out and let them dry. So I did all three because at heart I remain a scientist.

When I came back, I got Boyfriend to perform the blind taste-test. He tasted the stayed-in-syrup and dried-out-of-syrup peels and he preferred the in-syrup process. So I strongly recommend that you leave the peels in the sugary syrup for …as long as you want, really.

What to do with them now you say?

Well, you can eat the ones coated with sugar.

You can eat the others, too.

Or, you can dip them in melted dark chocolate, cool them in the fridge and then eat them.

Even I managed one or two, once coated in chocolate!