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Dessert

Candied Grapefruit Peel

Candied grapefruit peel is made by soaking rind, boiling, cutting into strips, cooking in sugar syrup, rolling in sugar, and drying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Grapefruit and sugar work together. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Candied Grapefruit Peel

Oven, in the book's wordsA very moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rind

  1. Soak grapefruit rind in cold salted water for 48 hours, changing the water 2 or 3 times.

  2. Boil the rind in cold water, changing the water twice, until a straw can easily penetrate.

  3. Remove the rind from heat and drain it.

  4. When cool, cut the rind into strips.

Candy and store

  1. Make a syrup with 1 cup of sugar and ⅓ cup of water for the rind of each grapefruit.

  2. Add the strips to the syrup and cook until the syrup is fully absorbed.

  3. When cool, roll each strip in granulated sugar and lay on a platter to dry.

  4. Pack the candied strips in preserve glasses to keep them soft.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Grapefruit + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Grapefruit rind
Forms the chewy candied strips that absorb the sugar syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the rind and, as syrup, replaces its water to make it candied and preserved.
Coarse sea salt
Softens and draws bitterness out of the rind during the long soak.

The step that matters

Boiling the rind in changed water. Boiling in several changes of water removes bitterness and softens the peel so a straw can pierce it. Skipping changes or boiling too briefly leaves the rind bitter or tough, which the later syrup cannot fix.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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