Celebrating the citrus season right now (and yes, citrus fruits do have a season and it’s called late winter/early spring), I like to flavor my tea with the bracing, acidic, sweet notes of citrus. The next time you peel a mandarin, clementine, or tangerine, or even grapefruit or pomelo (and there are so many varieties of all of these now in my favorite farmers’ markets), don’t throw away the peel.
Instead, using a small spoon, scrape away and discard as much of the bitter white pith as possible, cut what’s left into batons using a chef’s knife and place them on a sheet pan in a warm dry spot in your kitchen for a few days. It should dry and shrivel a bit but still retain a lot of its wonderful aroma. Once it’s fully dry, store it in a glass jar with a tight fitting lid, away from heat and light, just as you would store your spices. When you next taste some other great citrus fruit, perhaps a pomelo this time or a honey tangerine, repeat the process with the skin which would otherwise land in the compost heap or in the garbage. True recycling in the best sense of the word.
Whenever you are ready to enliven your tea drinking experience, needing an extra fillip of zesty flavor that at its best is truly seasonal, drop in a few thin shreds of the dried peel along with the tea leaves, heat the good quality water to the boil, or just under, and allow to steep for a few minutes.
Decant the liquid and then imbibe, inhaling the enhanced aroma of your favorite tea. I find that black teas from good gardens in Ceylon (Kenilworth or St. Clair for example), take to this treatment best. A couple of cinnamon sticks, roughly crushed to release their heady aroma, added to that jar of dried citrus peel would add another dimension, a redolent reminder of the spice trade and also of the origins of fine tea and true cinnamon.
I will absolutely try this. What do you think about using it with some heavier or lower cost green teas? I suspect the delicious flavor of the citrus will overpower the tea but especially with teas that I’ve bought and don’t really love, it might be worth trying. I can drink those teas for the health benefits and now, the delicious citrus taste. Also might be a great way to introduce green teas to friends who have resisted the idea because they find green teas “too bitter”.
Despite my attempts to educate them about temperature and time, they insist it’s bitter.
While experimenting with a Christmas blend tea a few months back I used a fruit peeler to strip off and dry only the outer rind of an orange, the part that would be used for a zest if prepared differently. What are you thoughts on this approach? Instead of air-drying I put it in the oven on very low heat, and it dried relatively quickly, in less than an hour. Kind of drifting off subject a bit but I did the same with nectarine for that tea blend, and of course added other spicing.
I love our citrus season here in SoCal — it’s now! I usually wait till the end of Jan to start picking my citrus fruits, but on my daily walks, I’m devasted to see how many citrus trees go unattended with most of their produce lying on the ground! Just something about waste and neglect that just gets to me! I love citrus in my teas!