San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Make the most of Texas’ citrus fruits.
Texas’ seasonal fruits — lemons, grapefruits, limes — star in tasty desserts
This time of year, it’s easy to fixate on what’s under the trees. But it’s worth paying attention to what’s on them as well.
South Texas is in peak citrus season, and all those oranges, grapefruits, lemons and other acidic orbs aren’t going to eat themselves, folks. With that in mind, this week we’re stepping up our holiday baking with four citrus-heavy recipes that make the most of our region’s seasonal bounty.
Grapefruit is the star of an interesting gelatin-based pie, while oranges make a syrupsoaked cake sing. We have lemon cookies that actually taste like lemon and an all-purpose citrus bar designed to use up the last few limes, clementines or any other lingering fruits taking up space in your kitchen.
And in each recipe we’re using as much of those fruits as we can. Zest, pulp, juice — it all has a place in our sweets, which means a more pronounced citrus flavor than you may be used to.
There are some caveats, of course. With most citrus fruit, the pith between the fruit segments and the zest is intensely bitter. We’ve mitigated that in our cake by first candying the orange slices that are used to garnish the finished dessert. The candying process blanches out much of that unpleasant taste, and a second simmer in sugar water hides any remaining bitterness.
Grapefruit zest in particular can be intensely bitter. We use it sparingly as a garnish on our grapefruit pie. The pie itself — a recipe we’ve slightly adapted from a similar dessert shared by the Texas Farm Bureau — already has an intense grapefruit flavor with segments cut from several ripe Texas fruits suspended in gelatin that would be overpowering with more zest added.
Most of us have probably bitten into a lackluster lemon cookie that fails to deliver the promised lemon kick. The cookies we’re baking this year are from a recipe developed by renowned baking authority
Dorie Greenspan. In addition to juice and zest, she adds a splash
For starters, you’ll need a way to get all that juice out of the fruit.
of lemon extract — an intense concentration of oil from lemon zest blended with alcohol. It’s a useful addition to any baker’s pantry.
There are a couple tools that you may not have on hand, but they will make your job easier. For starters, you’ll need a way to get all that juice out of the fruit.
If you happen to own a fancy electric counter-top juicer, by all means, use that. Handheld juice squeezers also work well, but only if you’re using a tool that’s an appropriate size for the fruit.
If you squeeze limes in an orange juice squeezer, you’ll likely be leaving lots of juice behind. We recommend having both a large and small handheld squeezer, which will enable you to make all this week’s recipes with ease.
The second piece of equipment you’ll definitely want is a rasp-style grater such as those made by Microplane. The fine blades on this kind of grater remove the finest ribbons of zest — and all the intense citrus oil the fruit has to offer — without digging into the bitter pith below.
Whether you bake any of these recipes or not, we here at the Taste Team wish y’all a happy holiday season, preferably with a twist of lemon.