the papa tomato said

Odds and ends:


Sous vide pig's foot, deboned (the pile of bones was about the same size), with copious amounts of rendered gelatin.


Dried satsumas. As simple as slicing them thinly - most satsumas are seedless - and putting them in the dehydrator at 135 for a night, maybe a day, depending on ambient humidity. (Harder to do in the oven - set it as low as it'll go and leave the door cracked.) They come out crispy, both the sweetness and the acidity concentrated. You can eat them as a snack - it's hard not to - or drop them into tea or coffee.

kabosu, yuzu, sudachi

This entry is about free stuff. Check out the free stuff policy here.

Marx Foods sent me three bottled citrus juices to play around with: yuzu, kabosu, and sudachi. I wanted to try sweet, savory, and cocktail applications with all three.

What I figured out pretty quickly is that the question here is not just "what can you do with these juices?" - it's "of the things you can do with these juices, which of them really show off the individual character of each juice?" And that list is much shorter. After all, even out of season it's pretty cheap to pick up some fresh lemons or limes - so there's no reason to use an expensive bottled juice in a dish where all you're going to taste is a little acidity. Just like you aren't going to put porcini mushrooms in chili, you don't want to use sudachi juice in a pitcher of punch with eleven other ingredients - it's not going to stand out.

Let's talk about the juices themselves first. Each of them, while more acidic than orange or grapefruit juice or anything else you'd drink a glass of, is noticeably less acidic than lemon or lime, and I had to correct the first things I made accordingly. I happen to have citric acid on hand - it's cheap enough, you can throw some in the dishwasher to make your dishes cleaner, and Amazon carries it - so it's easy for me to adjust acidity, and using citric acid to do so instead of lemon or lime juice preserves the original flavor. All of the desserts in particular benefit from a pinch of citric acid - it really brings out the flavors of the juice.

But I needed to try them straight, even if they're not meant to be drunk that way. A quick breakdown of the juices - first how the label describes them, then how they tasted to me.

Kabosu juice

label: "flavors and aroma of LEMON with accents of MINT and MELON"

me: a definite herbaceousness which I think is what they're calling mint - basil was what came to mind for me, though, because it certainly has none of the menthol of mint. I taste more navel orange than lemon, just tarter. This is the least tart of the three, to my palate - I didn't think to pick up pH papers to actually check acidity, but tartness is really the balance of acidity to sugar, I think, so a really objective measurement would have to measure Brix too. And I'm not picking up a refractometer.

Yuzu juice

label: "flavors and aroma of ORANGE, LEMON, and TANGERINE"

me: yuzu is really its own flavor. How would you describe lime, after all - "like lemon, but sharper"? The closest analogues to yuzu for me are lime and grapefruit, not orange or lemon. This is one of my favorite fruits - it's really terrific stuff.

Sudachi juice

label: "multiple flavors and aroma of LIME with accents of PEPPER and CUMIN"

me: I understand the pepper in the aroma, I guess, but I don't get cumin at all. Lime, though, yes. This is a less tart lime with something a little spicy and vegetal going on.

SWEETS

Kabosu bars

I made kabosu bars, for instance, using a regular lemon bar recipe, with about 25% more juice in order to really focus on the flavor. They were still too flat-flavored, so I included some citric acid in the confectioners sugar on top, and that did the trick.

Is it good? Yes.

Does the kabosu make a difference? Yes. You can definitely tell these aren't lemon bars.

Yuzu pie with huckleberries

A key lime pie - 1 can sweetened condensed milk, 3 egg yolks, and 3/4 cup juice blended together and baked for 20 minutes in a Graham cracker crust - with yuzu juice instead of key lime, a little citric acid added (critical when there's all that sweetened condensed milk), served with huckleberries on top.

Is it good? Absolutely delicious.

Does the yuzu make a difference? Hugely. You would easily be able to tell one citrus juice from another in side by side tasting, since nearly all the flavor comes from it.

Yuzu pudding cake

This type of pudding cake separates into two layers as it cooks - a light cake on top and a pudding underneath it. For some reason the top blackened very quickly, but doesn't taste it at all. I used yuzu juice and a hit of citric acid in place of the Meyer lemon juice called for in this epicurious recipe.

Is it good? Yes.

Does the yuzu make a difference? Less than in the pie, but yes, definitely.

COCKTAILS

All of the cocktails use a pinch of citric acid with the juice.

Hemingway daiquiri with yuzu

A Hemingway daiquiri has a little grapefruit juice and a little maraschino liqueur added to the standard daiquiri. I used yuzu juice and a touch of citric acid in place of the lime juice, and served with frozen grapefruit segments.

2 oz rum
.75 oz yuzu juice
1 teaspoon maraschino liqueur
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon grapefruit juice

Is it good? Pretty good but pretty sweet.

Does the yuzu make a difference? Somewhat. The maraschino drowns some of it out.

Kamiyama Bitter

I based this on the proportions of the bitters-heavy cocktails I make a lot, where cocktail bitters like Angostura or Peychaud's are used in place of a base liquor. Donn's Mix is a cinnamon-grapefruit syrup sold by Trader Tiki.

1 oz Ango orange
1 oz Trader Tiki's Donn's Mix
1 oz sudachi juice
1/2 oz blanco tequila

Is it good? It's not bad. It might be better with regular Angostura bitters.

Does the sudachi make a difference? No. There's a definite citrus flavor, but between the bitters and the cinnamon, you'd be hard pressed to identify this as sudachi instead of any other citrus.

Peacock Room

I've been wanting to play around with Pimms in things other than Pimms Cups, so this was a good opportunity. This is vaguely like a Corpse Reviver #2.

absinthe rinse
1 oz Pimms
1 oz yuzu juice
.75 oz Cocchi Americano
.75 oz gin
a couple Coca-Cola-infused cherries (optional)

Is it good? Yes. The spice of the Pimms works well with the Cocchi, the cherries, and the yuzu.

Does the yuzu make a difference? More than the daiquiri, so it's a step in the right direction - but not quite there yet.

Taketa Sour

I didn't want to combine maraschino with these juices again, so made something similar to a Last Word, with the more subtle St Germain instead of maraschino, dialed-down Chartreuse, and black raspberry infused mezcal.

1 oz St Germain
1 oz kabosu juice
.75 oz black raspberry infused mezcal
.5 oz Chartreuse
pinch citric acid

Is it good? It's quite, quite good. The best drink so far.

Does the kabosu make a difference? Yes and no. There's a definite pronounced citrus character despite the strength of the other flavors. I'm not sure it's notably different from what you would get from lime, though.

Kabosu gimlet

So I dialed it back to basics - focus everything around the juice.

1.5 oz gin
1 oz kabosu juice
.75 oz simple syrup
.5 oz douglas fir eau de vie

Is it good? Yes.

Does the kabosu make a difference? Yes. You're definitely tasting kabosu here, not sudachi, not yuzu, not lime or lemon.

SAVORIES

Sudachi Faux-Dobo

Marinate chicken in 1/2 cup sudachi juice, 1/4 cup soy sauce, tablespoon pepper vinegar; bake until very well cooked, transfer to stove top, add 1/4 cup sugar.

The idea here is to make something similar to adobo - vinegar and soy sauce - but with citrus juice. There's no added citric acid here.

Is it good? Yes. The sauce is the perfect offset to the richness of chicken thigh and the gelatinousness of long-cooked chicken wings.

Does the sudachi make a difference? More than I thought it would. Adding too many other ingredients - the garlic, peppercorns, and bay leaves traditionally used in adobo - would have muddied the waters too much.

Sudachi chicken and potatoes

This is kind of fiddly.

Brown a stick of butter: simply heat it until it foams, stops foaming, and there are a lot of visible brown solids. Let cool somewhat.

Blend the brown butter with 6 peppadews, 3 garlic cloves, 1/4 cup of sudachi juice, and 1 cup of chicken broth.

Bake chicken in the resulting sauce for at least an hour (at about 375-400), until the sauce has visibly reduced. Remove the chicken, add small whole potatoes to the broth, and cook for another hour so that the potatoes soak up the sauce. Transfer chicken, potatoes, and sauce to a larger shallow pan and cook for an additional half hour in order to crisp everything up.

Is it good? Yes. Rich, with the slight spice of the peppadews and the tartness of the juice offsetting the richness.

Does the sudachi make a difference? It's not entirely lost but would be no worse with lemon.

Kabosu Fried Chicken

Make a sauce of about 2 parts Kabosu juice to 1 part Korean red pepper paste, with a little bit (1-2 Tablespoons) of brown butter, a litle sugar, and a little cornstarch dissolved in cold water. Heat the sauce until it thickens.

Lightly bread and fry pieces of chicken and then toss them in the sauce.

Is it good? It's delicious - spicy, tart, and sweet. Awesome junk food/bar food.

Does the kabosu make a difference? Yes, although the spicier you make it, the less you will notice the specific citrus characteristics.

Spicy cod with kabosu

Stir-fry together sliced Korean green chiles (mild to medium), grated ginger, soaked and crushed fermented black beans or storebought black bean sauce, a little Thai chile paste, a little cornstarch dissolved in cold water, and a few tablespoons of kabosu juice until the sauce is noticeably tart.

Sear chunks of cod and then add them to the sauce to finish cooking. Serve with rice.

Is it good? Very tasty.

Does the kabosu make a difference? Not really - any source of acidity would be the same.

INCIDENTAL USES

Mango slices with kabosu juice and black sesame seeds.

You can use the juice as a condiment by itself, of course - sprinkling it on fried fish, raw greens, cucumber and onion, kimchi and sesame seeds, fresh fruit, and so on. You can also use it in vinaigrettes. However, unless you're serving it with something very bland - a simple green salad, maybe - you're not going to pick up many flavor specifics. While this is one of the most common uses of these juices in Japan - as well as in ponzu sauce, yuzu juice with soy sauce - the fruits are also cheaper there.

They'll come forward better added to tea. I didn't think lemonade-type drinks quite worked - the flavor seemed too diluted.

All in all, what are these juices best for? I would definitely make the faux-dobo again, which was not only one of the tastiest things I made but something that showed off the flavor well. Cocktails that really focus on a citrus juice as the main flavor - such as a whiskey sour, gimlet, or sidecar - all work well, but any more complicated flavors will drown out the nuance. And desserts work well across the board.

Bottled vs Fresh. I've never had fresh kabosu, but I've had fresh sudachi and fresh yuzu several times and cooked with them extensively. Is there a difference? Sure. It's similar to the difference between fresh lemon juice and a good bottled brand, though more care seems to be taken here than with most supermarket lemon juice. You do lose some flavors because you get none of the oil or the flavor compounds that disappear with age - but you're still getting real yuzu and sudachi flavor, not some imitation extract. I noticed no real difference in the desserts between the fresh and the bottled. The difference is only really notable in beverages - cocktails and tea. Even so, fresh yuzu is hard to find, only available for a brief part of the year, and costs a lot - as compromises go, bottled yuzu juice is a good one.

professor, what's another word for pirate treasure?

Put your Doc Martens on, I don't want anyone to break a toe when I drop some science.

From a cocktail perspective, the problem with orange juice is that it's not very strongly flavored.  Grapefruit, lime, lemon, and the various high-acid exotics all stand up to liquor just fine.  Orange, tangerine, and their variants do not.  They quickly become drowned out.

Over the winter I froze some satsuma juice.

What happens when you start to thaw juice is you wind up with this:

From a partially thawed container, I poured off the juice.  Look at what's left in the container -- look at how much clear ice is there.  You in the back, what's clear ice once it's thawed?  Right, water.

So what we have in the measuring cup is concentrated juice, see, but it's concentrated without cooking anything down and boiling anything off: a lossless concentration, more or less.  Technically, if you repeat this over and over again you can make a syrup -- you can make grenadine that way, starting with frozen pomegranate juice.  There's quite a lot of volume loss, and it's a time-consuming process.

But a single run through the freezer?  Think of it this way: you have just as much sugar, just as much acid, just as much of the flavor compounds, in less volume.  You've removed water.  When you add the alcohol of a cocktail, you bring the juice back up to its original volume, and you've replaced that water, that clear ice, with your gin and Campari, or your Aperol and genever, or if you're making a Union Club, your 2 oz bourbon, 1 1/2 oz juice, 1/2 oz maraschino, 1/2 oz Campari. 

Kapow.

barely know her

Grapefruit Bitters - the simplest bitters to make at home because you can get everything except one optional ingredient at the supermarket.

1 empty 750ml bottle
1 large grapefruit
black tea
cinnamon chunks or 1 cinnamon stick
whole allspice
gentian (optional)

Juice the grapefruit. Drink the juice. Cut the juiced grapefruit - rind, pith, bits of pulp, and all, though feel free to get rid of any seeds - into small pieces and stuff them into the 750ml bottle.

Add loose black tea (about enough for two cups of tea, I'd say) to the bottle, along with a stick's worth of cinnamon and a pinch of whole allspice. If you have gentian, add a pinch of it to help round out the bitterness.

Add vodka until everything is covered. 100 proof vodka is better than 80.

Let it sit for a couple weeks, maybe a month, shaking the bottle from time to time. Because everything will expand in the bottle, you'll lose some vodka, but the bottle is also practically self-straining -- just pour it from the big bottle into something smaller, and almost all the solids will remain in the bottle.

A drink to make with your grapefruit bitters:

1 oz grapefruit bitters
1 oz St Germain elderflower liqueur
1 oz Ugli fruit juice (sub orange or grapefruit juice)
3/4 oz lemon juice
1/2 oz rye

(I would love to know why, with the new version of Opera, I'm suddenly unable to click "publish post" in blogger. I can type, I can save, but to post, I have to open blogger in Firefox instead, and because blogger and Google are linked, that means logging out of my normal Google account and logging back in as okaycheckitout, just to go to the dashboard, open the draft, and click freaking publish. Actually, I don't want to know why. I just want it to stop being true.)

there's this girl that's been on my mind

It seems possible that I was the only person to start the day with yogurt and sudachi for breakfast. Despite the 20 or more different kinds of homemade marmalade in the house, that's the admittedly unexciting task to which I tend to assign them.

The sudachi is a Japanese citrus fruit which is likely a hybrid of the mandarin and the papeda subgenus, making it a relative of the yuzu and the kaffir lime. It's fairly lime-like, the flavor of the juice sharper and less complex (or "more focused" if you like) than that of the yuzu, the rind less perfumed than the kaffir.

You can occasionally find bottles of sudachi juice.  You may be able to find the fresh fruit at the farmers' markets of citrus-growing parts of the country, or stores with an especially good selection of Japanese produce.  I bought mine from the White Dove Passion Fruit Farm, so they weren't cheap thanks to the shipping -- but on the other hand, they came out to about a dollar each, and even navel oranges cost nearly that much at my supermarket.  You know how I am: I hadn't had them before, so didn't really have a choice.

I have a mental list of things to try, with any citrus I pick up that you can't just eat.  I mean, there are a million things you can do with citrus, but if you're trying something new, you want to try it in something where it's the most prominent flavor.

Things to do with citrus that's too sour to eat out of hand:

Cocktails: Aviation, Whiskey Sour, Margarita

"Lemon" bars

"Key lime" pie

Shaker "lemon" pie (if you think the rind is palatable enough)

Curd

Liqueur: straight (vodka + peel), sweetened (vodka + peel + sugar), bitters (vodka + peel + botanicals + bittering agent such as gentian, cinchona, grapefruit pith, etc), infused spirit (Seville orange + gin is traditional)

Candied

Marmalade

Flavored sugar (zest + sugar + time)

"Lemon"ade, lemonade iced tea

Salad dressing

Mojo criollo (juice + olive oil + garlic + Cuban oregano, use as dip for fried yuca, fish, etc)

I also tend to dry a lot of the zest, and freeze a lot of the juice.

With the sudachi, I made a sudachi cream pie, two flavored sugars (one with yuzu and sudachi, one with Seville orange and sudachi), a quart of marmalade to have with yogurt, and am left with a cup of juice -- some of which I think I'll use for mojo criollo.

everybody knows about the curd

My camera is maybe dying, so I couldn't get a good photo of this, which is a shame since the color is so distinctive.

You have probably had lemon curd, because if nothing else, the filling in lemon bars is essentially lemon curd that forms in the oven, stiffened with a little flour.  Curd is a custard, with butter instead of milk or cream, making a spread or condiment rather than something you'd serve by the bowlful -- though everyone who makes it does seem to eat it by the spoonful.

Traditionally made with citrus, you occasionally see it made with other tart fruit -- passion fruit, pomegranate -- and even more occasionally, with other things completely, like vanilla bean.  But the creamy richness of it offsets citrus the best, and because the other ingredients don't add much flavor, it makes for a great showcase for citrus.  I had both Seville oranges and Yuzu to use up before they passed their prime, and basically made a list of citrus-centric preparations and then decided which I'd use the Seville for, and which the Yuzu.  For now, curd landed in Camp Seville.

Seville oranges are one of several oranges known as sour or bitter oranges -- oranges that aren't suited for eating out of hand, not only because they have many large seeds but because the juice is almost as sour as a lemon's.  The tradeoff is that the rind and oil are much richer in flavor than those of sweet oranges.  Seville oranges are traditionally used in marmalade, while the peel is used to flavor gin, beer, and candy.  I add a little Seville orange peel to the French press when I make coffee sometimes.

There are many recipes for citrus curd out there, with major differences in their approach -- double boilers are common, to keep the egg from overcooking.  I used David Lebovitz's simple and effective method without a double boiler, whisking constantly with the whisk attachment on my new immersion blender.  Despite the pot having a particularly thin bottom (my thick pots are unenameled cast iron, which isn't suited for acidic things like citrus), it came out terrifically -- and maybe because of the whisking, maybe because of other factors, it came out light and somewhat fluffy, instead of thick and jam-like the way I'm used to.

David's recipe uses less sugar because the Meyer lemons he uses are sweeter than real lemons; I used the same reduced sugar proportions for the same reason.  I also added about a shot of Campari, and about a shot of Aperol, the combination of which gave everything a slightly embarrassed peach color.  

Serving suggestion: with dense, powerful gingerbread; poundcake; or homemade biscuits.

if you want to go where they chain up the sun

Anyone who knows me outside this blog knows that I love citrus fruit.  I mean, my love for it is kind of ridiculous.  Sure, yes, an orange is terrific, or a grapefruit half for breakfast, or some key lime pie.  Lemonade iced tea, aka half and half, aka the Arnold Palmer, depending on where you live.  Margaritas, made correctly with fresh lime juice, not some weird bottled mix.  And so on.

But I tend to take it further.  My love of citrus approaches reverence.  Unfortunately, I live in New Hampshire.  There is not much variety, and too often what you find on the shelves is dry or bland.  Even in the best case scenarios, it's waxed, which is a nuisance if, like me, you regularly candy fruit or use it in liqueurs.

Last year, flush with a wider and woolier revenue stream than I currently enjoy, I bought citrus from several different orchards, the highlights of which were the variety assortments from Friends Ranches and the many offerings from Rising C Ranches (aka Ripe To You, mentioned in the comment discussion about yuzu, which in fact I've now ordered).  This is not a "free stuff" post or anything -- there are a LOT of online citrus sources out there, and these happen to be the two I've had the most luck with.  Friends has particularly good prices, relative to the quality and variety; Ripe To You's selling point is the exotic citrus fruit they sell that few other people do.

For instance, last year, in addition to some lemons, oranges, and grapefruit, I bought Rangpur limes, limequats, Bergamot oranges, Seville oranges, kaffir limes, and a wide variety of mandarin oranges.  I also bought these, which I've picked up again this year:

Calamondin are also known as kalamansi, though I've heard some rumbling that they're not the exact same thing; maybe they're two very similar varieties, I don't know.  (I have bought fruit labeled as each, and the distinctive flavor is there in both, but it is true that the fruit sold as kalamansi was noticeably smaller than the fruit sold as calamondin.)  It might well be my favorite citrus fruit -- which logically makes it my favorite fruit, and thus my favorite food.

Bill, what the hell is a calamondin, you're thinking.

Well, it looks like a small orange, as you can see.  The peel is sweet and edible, like a kumquat, and it's a hybrid between a kumquat and an unknown species.  There are a whole bunch of kumquat hybrids -- limequats are obvious in their parentage -- but the calamondin stands out as having its own distinct flavor.  I've described it to people as "like a cross between a tangerine and a lime," but that isn't quite right (and besides, it also describes the Rangpur lime).  It gets you on the right track, though -- there is definitely a "tangerine-ness" to the flavor.  It's nearly as tart as lemons and limes -- technically you can eat it out of hand, but it'll make your mouth pucker like a Warhead.  (I do it anyway.)  It's not until you juice it and try to substitute the juice for lemon or lime juice that you realize it's not quite as sour as them, and that if you're using it in a cocktail, you'll need slightly less sweetener.

It does make fantastic cocktails, in fact.  I've been working on a "winter margarita" using seasonal citrus and winter-appropriate spices, but it's not ready for the public yet; suffice to say a couple drafts have been made with calamondin juice.  

What it goes terrifically with is Aperol.  I'll probably have a post on Aperol later, but it's a potable bitter (Amaro) like Campari, only slightly less bitter, slightly more sweet, and with a far more pronounced orange flavor.  The "homemade Campari" I made a few years ago was in fact very similar to Aperol, I just didn't know it at the time.  Anyway, Aperol and calamondin juice -- nothing else, no filler like club soda, no need for sugar, just adjust until the sugar in the Aperol balances out the acid in the juice -- is pretty damn amazing, and though I had planned to freeze some of the calamondin juice ... it may not make it.

What else can you do with calamondin?  Marmalade, of course, and you can candy them -- I have a number I'm candying, and after juicing the calamondins, I've been candying the leftover peels as well, to add to yogurt.