Amazing and Wondrous Grapefruit Rind Candy

I am what I eat. There’s a big part of me that’s made purely of grapefruit.

There is something so sublime about its bitterness that I go through phases of eating up to 3 a day (without sugar!). So when I came across a recipe at Smitten Kitchen (amazing pics by the way), I had to try it out for myself.

candied grapefruit2 — This is from my first attempt, quite bitter but incredibly addictive despite only being able to have 1 every half hour or so…

After looking around for some variations of this recipe and studying up a bit on candied fruit in general, this is what I deem to be a damn near fool-proof method for amazing candied grapefruit rinds:

candied grapefruit3 — 2 grapefruit yields enough candied rinds to give you a very high dose of Vitamin C and ensures that you will have more friends than normal for about 3-7 days.

Ingredients:

2 grapefruit
3 cups castor sugar

Method:

Cut grapefruit into quarters and remove flesh so only the rinds remain. Cut into strips. The thinner the strips the less bitter I found, but be careful not to cut too thinly because the slight bitterness helps cut through the sweetness.

Place the rinds into a pot of cold water and slowly bring to the boil, once boiling, let it boil for 1 minute.

Take rinds off heat, strain, rinse with cold water, and repeat. This process removes the bitterness. The first time I tried it I did it thrice and although it did remove most of the bitterness it was still quite bitter; the second time I did it four times and the results were amazing.

To 1 cup of water add enough sugar to make a saturated sugar solution, with castor sugar this is around 2.5 cups of sugar (amazing how soluble it is!), and while still cool add your rinds. Slowly bring to the boil and then let it simmer for around 10 minutes. I left the pot to cool for about an hour to make sure the syrup had permeated the rinds and it makes it much easier to handle so you don’t melt your digits off.

candied grapefruit6 — This was my first attempt – looks amazing but quite a fair amount of bitterness comes through because of the thickness of the rind and the amount of times they were boiled in the first phase.

Once cooled, place the pieces on a drying rack so that they can dry out a bit till ‘tacky’. Many references left theirs for up to 8 hours – which I, dictated by my sweet-tooth, found completely unacceptable. So I turned up the heat a in the oven for 5 minutes and then allowed to cool. This is a much quicker alternative.

candied grapefruit1 — This was my second attempt. Notice the translucent pith of the rinds.

Coat in castor sugar.

Eat.

Apparently they can last for a week or 2 if left out in the open. They’ve never lasted long enough to test the theory.

Enjoy

PS. if you want the nerd in you to come out a play for a bit Google “the Grapefruit effect”. Apparently grapefruit effect certain medications in interesting ways.