Occasionally I’ll get a bug up my butt about some recipe, technique or in some cases, entire dinner parties, and end up spending a ton of time, effort and money to realize them.
Today’s random recipe was the Gabrielle Hamilton (who I totally fangirl over) recipe in the New York Times for Cold Candied Oranges (subscription needed, but it’s totally worth it!).
The recipe calls for a channel knife, which isn’t something that I’ve ever played with before, but thank you Amazon for providing a great selection of channel knives (without zesters). I ended up getting this one on same day delivery:
Which produced lovely peels and cool patterns on my blood oranges:
The instructions in this recipe were pretty exact, and while I appreciated that, Hamilton’s reference to her induction burners that could keep a steady temperature irritated me as WHO has one of those at home?
I slaved away over our old gas range at home with a candy thermometer jammed into the simple syrup as the oranges simmered away for 45 minutes. It smelled pretty heavenly. I was also left over with extra simple syrup, and there will definitely be some leftover after we eat the oranges, so I’m thinking blood orange infused simple syrup margaritas. I’ll see if I can develop a recipe.
Here are the finished oranges, and believe it or not, the color of both the oranges and the syrup deepened after they’d cooled off for a few hours.
We tried the syrup and some of the peels last night and they were fantastic. I’m incredibly excited to try the entire orange, however the recipe says that they’re best after 48 hours of chilling, so I have to wait to try them tomorrow. Will update on texture and flavor of the fruit tomorrow.
Update: They were amazing. Although Chris found them too sweet, probably because they were still covered in simple syrup, which, by the way, turned pink!
Cooking the Books 