These days, when Tom comes home and there’s something like a 7-lb bag of pretzel M&M’s sitting on the counter, I just shrug my shoulders and remind him that I’m pregnant; I have no control of decisions at the grocery store.
The same thing happened last week when I made candied grapefruit peels. I’ve never had them, made them, or even heard of them, but when I ran across this recipe they just looked so good. I had to make them.
Disclaimer: I love the flavor of grapefruit, but I don’t actually like grapefruit. I have grapefruit chap stick and cough drops, but I can’t take the bitterness of the real thing, even when it’s drowned in sugar. So this recipe was a little bit of a risk.
The recipe calls for four grapefruits, but since this is my first time I just used one. The whole process is pretty time consuming, but simple.
Bitter? Yes. But so, so pretty.Grapefruit peels, cut into strips.
Here are my peels after being boiled and strained four times. Apparently this removes the bitterness, so this is a very important step. Crazy how different the peels look, so swollen and slimy.
The recipe calls for a non-reactive pan. I’m pretty sure my stainless steel pans are non-reactive, but I used my enamel-coated Dutch oven, just to be safe.
The next step is to boil the grapefruit peels for a very long time in an obscene amount of sugar. This is the part where you completely remove any of the grapefruit’s health benefits and replace them with sugar.
This is what the peels look like after boiling in sugar, and cooling. Sorta like gummy worms.
Next, I tempered some chocolate on the stove and dipped the candied peels. (I left a few un-dipped).
While they were cooling, I cleaned up. There was some chocolate left in the pan. My Dad taught me to not waste food, so I cleaned it out with a marshmallow.
The finished product! Nice, eh? The recipe also suggests sprinkling them with sugar, but I felt like I’d used enough sugar for the week already.
They were good, but there was still a little too much grapefruit bitterness for me. If I do it again, I’ll do a few more boils and rinses. If you don’t mind the bitter taste, you’d love it.
The marshmallow dipped in chocolate, though? Now THAT was delicious.
For the complete recipe, check out this site.
