Orengat

Candied Orange Peel

Translation:

Cut the peel of an orange into five pieces and scrape away the skin inside with a knife; then set them to soak in pure fresh water for nine days, and change the water every day.  Then boil them in pure water, but only until they come to a boil, and when this is done spread them on a cloth and let them dry out well.  Then put them in a pot with enough honey to cover them and boil over a slow fire, skimming.  And when you think that the honey is cooked …then take out your orange peels and ragne them in a layer, and sprinkle powder of ginger over, then another layer, and sprinkle, etc., until finished; and leave a month or more before eating.

(Hieatt, pp. 133)

Ingredients:

6 thin skinned oranges

2 cups honey

Powdered ginger

Redaction:

I had to do a few variations.  The first is that I had no Seville oranges, so I used think skinned Texas navels.

The sections were cut into 6 sections instead of 5; however seeing that the navels were fairly large I was pretty sure the extra section could be over looked.  The orange peels of a Seville orange are reputed to be bitter, hence the soaking and draining, besides making the peels more flexible.

So instead of soaking for 9 days, I soaked the peels for 24 hours.

I skipped the step where the skins were to be blanched.  What could have happened if Seville oranges peels were used, would be that I would have put the peels into boiling water for about 30 seconds, enough to soften them up even further.  The navel peels were pretty flexible and soft after 24 hours so the thought of making them more sore worried me a bit.

Next I put the skins into honey, enough to cover and boiled till the peels were saturated and limp, roughly 15 minutes in the boiling honey bath.

Enough honey to cover.

This is the honey boiling with the oranges peels immersed.  At this portion, care is needed so that the honey does not boil over the sides of the pot.

The peels were then placed on parchment paper and sprinkled with ginger.

I placed any where from 5-6 peels per parchment sheet.  I did add a little sugar to the finished ginger dusted peels as I wanted a crystalline look to the peels.

There are about 5 layers of orange peels.  A clay pot that I was not using for anything specific was transformed into the storage container for them before I break them out for a different sort of tasty treat.

The original recipe does not specify what type of container or that the peels were separated between layers.  They layers may have been stacked one on top of each other so that each side benefited from the ginger dusting or the writer of the recipe figured that layering was so matter of fact that the information did not need to be added into the written recipe.  My suggestion would be to try both ways and see which one you prefer for your next candied orange peel experiment!