Candied Grapefruit Peel

As you get older, you tend to forget things. Often it’s blamed it on age, or an allusion to an early onset of a memory-loss disorder. I forget things all the time, but I blame it on a full brain. Think about it; every ten years, our brains have so much more information to remember than they did a decade ago. Think about all you’ve done in the last ten years, then multiply it by four, or five, or six, or seven. That’s a lot to remember. And unlike computers, we can’t empty our trash or upgrade our memory. We’re stuck with what we’ve got

You name it; names, dates, places, birthdays, and even recipes I’ve written, I’ve forgotten about. That goes for Candied Grapefruit Peel, which I made the other day after I’d made a batch of Pink Grapefruit Marmalade. I was diligent about jotting down what I did, photographing the steps, writing up the recipe to share, and taking more pictures of the results. They were so pretty, how could I not?

I may forget some of the past, but I can see into the future. I know that if I presented a recipe that left you with four empty grapefruit rinds, I’d get asked if I had a recipe for candied grapefruit rinds.

So I got this post and recipe all ready to go, but before I pushed the Publish button, I used the search engine on the blog to find some posts I wanted to link to here and found that there already was a recipe for candied grapefruit peels. Laughing to myself, I figured I’d posted the recipe six or seven years ago, but looking at the date of the post, it was less than two years ago. So the joke was on me.

Speaking of the past (since I seem to have trouble now, even with the future), I used to dream about writing a candy book, because I love candy. I like making it and I like eating it. The problem is that recipes are not always easy to reproduce when you consider a broad spectrum of factors; humidity, type of sugar, different materials of cookware, altitude, variations in fruit, chocolate, sugar, and butter, but most of all, it was because I knew there is a blanket aversion to using candy thermometers, which I find odd because so many people are into measuring things with pinpoint accuracy. (I hope they drive with the same care and precision that they think they need to bake with!)

I also knew that writing a book of recipes that involves precise measurements in two different systems of measurement would erode what little seems left of my brain. I had night sweats because a handful of the metric measurements in Drinking French were simply too small to register on a kitchen scale, like 1/2 teaspoon of camomile flowers. It weighed almost nothing, and I feared people would take exception to that, or leave a bad review somewhere. So, as always, it’s good to keep an open mind and assume that people are doing their best, even if your  (or their) mind isn’t what it used to be.

Anyhow, your friends and family will lose their minds, in a good way, when you present them with some of these wonderful candied grapefruit peels, which are quite easy to make.

Once you’ve got the rinds, you simply slice them, blanch them to soften and remove some of the bitterness of the white pith (but not all of it, since that’s a nice quality that grapefruit peels have), then cook the peels in a sugar syrup while gazing at your candy thermometer, which’ll kindly let you know when the peels are done. It’s a no-brainer.