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Dessert

Candied Grape Fruit Peel

Candied grapefruit peel is made by boiling grapefruit skins, then coating them in a sugar syrup and drying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 Grape Fruit Peel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Remove all pith from grapefruit skins, leaving a little on the skins.

  2. Scrub the skins with a small brush, wash thoroughly, and cut into small strips.

  3. Soak the strips in cold water for 2 hours, then drain.

  4. Add fresh cold water and bring to a boil; repeat this process 3 times.

  5. Cook the strips for about 5 minutes on the third boil.

  6. Drain and wash the strips thoroughly.

Candy the peel

  1. Make a syrup by dissolving 3 cups of sugar in 1 cup of water.

  2. Drop the strips of grapefruit peel into the dissolved sugar syrup.

  3. Boil very slowly until the syrup is absorbed and the peel is transparent.

  4. Roll each piece in granulated sugar and place on paraffin paper for a few days.

  5. Pack the candied peel in a tin box with paraffin paper between layers.

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 skins
Provide the peel that becomes the candy, with pith partly kept for texture.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the peel and, as syrup, replaces the water in the peel so it turns translucent.

The step that matters

Boil very slowly in the syrup. Slow simmering lets the sugar syrup slowly penetrate the peel. Fast boiling can crystallise or darken the syrup before the peel is fully infused and clear.

“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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