Hello Everyone,
It is December, and we all know what that means. It is Yuzu time, and we all know what that means. We’ve all been here before, it’s time…to coat some peels in white powder while hastily taking poorly lit photos with my hand me down iPhone. Let it snow.
For the price of about five dollers, the rich people grocery store gave me these two little babies. I let them rest on the shelf for a couple days. Picked them up for a scratch and sniff every time I walked by. But now is the time. Let’s get these out onto a tray.
Nice.
First order of business: transfer the rich flavonoid compounds from the fruit to a container. This time, I’m going with grating. With a grater. We will, of course, remove the outer layer of zest and leave behind the alluringly bitter pith and rind.
No problemo. We’ll calculate how much citric acid and water to use based on the zest weight. It probably makes more sense to use a mix of citric and malic acid but I only have one of these. Powdered sumac? Too risky. Who knows what could happen.
Mix this up and let it sit out on the counter for about an hour. In the meantime let’s figure out what to do with the rest of the carcass.
I went ahead and squeezed the as much of the juice as I could get from the flesh and then rubbed them against my wire meshed deep fry spider thing to get the rest. Dumped the juice in with the zest and citric acid.
Hmm. What about this stuff. I ended up scraping off the…meat? from the peels leaving behind the rind/pith, collecting all of that and chopping it down as fine as I could with a knife. I took this yuzu pulp mush and then put it into a little container and covered it with seasoned rice vinegar.
Will try using this as like a kinda floral-y grated-daikonish kinda topper for proteins, etc. Tastes pretty good at least for now.
Anways, I added this much water to the now steeped and extracted zest + acid + juice bowl. Let it sit with the water for a while, and then strained the liquid out into a container. I decided to then take the leftover zest mush and just plop it in with the pulp/vinegar topper.
And so the ritual is complete again. This time we’ve got ourselves what basically functions as slightly flowery lemon juice.
For tonights snack time I squizzed out a few splashes of the Super Juice into a cup along with
the special honey and some hot water.
Look, fine, my parents do have an almost illicit-seeming but apparently pretty common tax-break scenario going where they pay some kinda bee keeper dude to place and maintain a certain government-approved quantity of beehives on their property and in return they can qualify as some kind of actual producing farm, I guess, rather than just a big yard with pet goats and birds, etc etc. Anyways, part of this arrangement entitles them to a (smaller than I would have imagined?) quantity of either their beehives’? the collected total beehives’ of the beekeeper dudes flock? honey output once or twice a year or whatever. It tastes very good.
It looks like the sun is going down…and well, somebody’s got to feed them hogs…so. Thanks for listening, see you next time. Bye bye.
