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Dessert

Candied Orange or Lemon Peel

A preserved citrus peel candied in sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Candied Orange or Lemon Peel

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Boil the rinds in plenty of water until tender and the bitterness is gone, changing the water once or twice if necessary.

  2. In a separate pot, combine ½ pound of sugar with 1 cup of water for each pound of peel and heat until clear.

  3. Add the peels to the syrup, cover, and boil until the peels are clear and the syrup is almost candy-like.

  4. Remove the peels and lay them on an inverted sieve to dry.

Candy and dry

  1. Boil the syrup with additional sugar until it candies around the peels.

  2. Place the candied peels on a sieve and put them in a warm oven until perfectly dry.

  3. Pack the dried peels in a wooden box with tissue paper.

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. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms a syrup that penetrates the peel, making it sweet and eventually giving a crisp, candied coating.
Citrus rinds
Provide the peel that becomes the candied confection; boiling first softens them and removes bitterness.

The step that matters

Boiling the rinds until the bitterness is gone. Citrus peel holds bitter compounds in the white pith. Boiling in fresh water until tender, and changing the water if needed, draws out bitterness so the finished peel tastes sweet rather than harsh.

“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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