A candied-fruit primer. Plus: A recipe for stollen pound cake
Candied fruit has long had a bad rap. Most encounter it during the holiday season in the form of syrup-slicked mystery bits (which are often turnip, believe it or not) that go into Christmas fruitcake, the leathery candied peel in supermarket Panettone, or the glacé cherries that top spritz cookies sold at holiday bake sales that have had all their colour and flavour bleached out before they are plumpened with corn syrup and dyed a garish scarlet.
But there’s a night and day difference between mass-produced candied fruit and that which is made artisanally or at home, says pastry chef and cookbook author Camilla Wynne.
“I think a lot of people have just never had good candied fruit,” she says.
Pastry chef Camilla Wynne's new book, Nature’s Candy is a how-to on the candying process.Mickaël A. Bandassak/Supplied
The good stuff isn’t just identifiable by appearance, but taste as well. Generic store-bought candied cherries have as much in common with fresh cherries as they do red lollipops. They are bright red or green and taste flat, like liquid sugar poured into a cherry-shaped mould. Artisanal candied amarena cherries, meanwhile, maintain their deep garnet colour and hit you with sweetness at first but preserve the cherry’s sour notes, as well.
On a late November day in her Toronto apartment, Wynne stands over a pot of clementine wedges simmering in a solution of sugar and water. She watches each wedge transform into something completely new: its bumpy peel is shellacked smooth and takes on a deeper vibrancy; its pulp turns glassy, almost luminescent. In 30 minutes, a subpar piece of fruit becomes something that should appear in a Dutch still-life painting.
Wynne's book also features recipes for the candied fruit like this one for Mendiant Shortbread.Mickaël A. Bandassak/Supplied
For Wynne, this is the rebrand candied fruit deserves. The preservation expert’s most recent book, Nature’s Candy, demystifies how to candy everything from blueberries to persimmons in a home kitchen, as well as how to feature those natural confections in desserts such as star anise and candied peel sablés and white wine jelly with frosted grapes.
She’s among a new generation of pastry chefs finding inventive ways to showcase the surprising complexity of candied fruit that go far beyond the cloying regifted fruitcake.
This season, Toronto’s Robinson Bread created a stollen croissant starring candied orange peel and rum raisins. Halifax’s Dee Dee’s ice cream sold a limited-edition hazelnut ice cream with glistening orbs of candied local cranberries. Montreal’s Sabayon, recently named Canada’s best new restaurant by enRoute Magazine, featured on its tasting menu a pear granita that had, buried under its icy topping, a nest of whipped sheep’s milk ricotta surrounding cubes of fresh pear and jewels of chewy candied pear.
The preservation technique, which involves submerging or simmering fruit in sweet syrup to replace its water content with sugar, has been around for thousands of years. In ancient Rome, Persia, China and the Arab world, quince, apples, oranges and plums were preserved in honey, juice and sugar solutions. As sugar became cheaper and more widely available, candying became a part of many culinary traditions around the world, though in North America, it usually makes its grand appearance during the holiday season.
Long before he became one of Canada’s most renowned pastry chefs, Patrice Demers had developed an aversion to candied fruit. Every Christmas, his mother, a schoolteacher, would receive endless bricks of fruitcake from her students. “As a kid, I used to hate it. I thought they were awful – so dense and everything. I really didn’t like that,” he said.
Patrice Demers' sumo mandarin dessert.Patrice Demers/Supplied
But his first trip to France, in 2000, challenged everything he knew about candied fruit’s potential. One day, he wandered into a pastry shop and his eyes lit up: He felt like a kid in a candy store, except the confections were all naturally derived. There were jars upon jars filled with fruit that looked crafted from polished glass, expertly preserved through candying. The most breathtaking of all was a luscious whole candied pineapple.
With this bounty of inspiration, he set to work in his own kitchen, spending the past two dozen years bathing fruits and vegetables in hot sugar syrup and then finding unexpected ways to deploy them in dishes. At his restaurant Sabayon, candied fennel stems play a supporting role in a citrus salad. Sumo mandarins are turned into a sorbet topped with a meringue flavoured with their zest and finished with their thick, candied peel. And that aforementioned pear granita only felt complete when Demers added the candied pear, which balanced the richness of whipped ricotta and the saltiness of the parmesan crisps that accompanied it. He often uses the fruity syrup left over from candying to flavour cocktails.
While Demers candies fruit with the intention of surprising guests at his restaurant with the new dimension of flavour and texture they can bring to a dish, D.C.-based pastry chef Paola Velez transforms fruit into candy in a more literal way.
Paola Velez’s pineapple empanadillasLauren V. Allen/Supplied
In her recent book Bodega Bakes, Velez argues with the right process, fruit can be transformed into something with a pleasingly artificial flavour and texture. Her take on a Pop-Tart is a pineapple empanadilla – pineapple candied with sugar, lime zest and salt and encased in an empanada shell. She tries to replicate the sour-sweet punch of Sour Straws with her recipe for guava lemon bars topped with candied lemon peel, where a pinch of citric acid adds an extra-tart note to the dessert.
“I’m teaching people it won’t look the same, but it’ll taste the same,” she says. “I can candy lemons and I can get you so close – you need that hit of dopamine and I can get you there.”
Velez’s majarete (corn pudding)Lauren V. Allen/Supplied
Like so many acts of preserving, candying was a communal effort in Velez’s family when she was growing up in the Dominican Republic. When there was a harvest of sour orange, lemons or guava, the women in her family would stop what they were doing for the day to form an assembly line to process the fruit – someone would boil it, another would coat the fruit in sugar. There were no boundaries to what they’d try to candy, including zucchini, sunchokes, carrots, russet potatoes and corn.
Typically, the Dominican corn pudding majarete’s velvety finish is garnished with a humble sprinkling of ground cinnamon, but Velez’s version is topped with “corn spoon sweets.”
“The outer membrane of corn is really resilient so you can push this candying process until they turn into little jewels. They turn into these gummy bear-esque things,” she says.
Amisha Gurbani, a recipe developer who grew up in Mumbai but now lives in the Bay Area in California, was similarly smitten by the way candying fruit could bring out new properties in it – a far cry from the one-dimensional “tutti frutti” mix of diced and dyed candied papaya used in cakes and ice cream in India.
Raw orange rind is technically edible, but so bitter as to be unpleasant to eat on its own. Candying it removes most – but not all – of the bitterness, and adds a chewiness that requires you to slow down and savour it.
“You get the slight bitterness, the sweetness and a slight tanginess as well. You’re getting all these different notes from one fruit,” she said.
One of the most popular recipes in Gurbani’s book, Mumbai Modern, is for a blood orange and hibiscus tart, in which a curd made from blood orange juice and hibiscus powder is baked in a gingersnap crust and crowned with slices of candied blood orange that have been cooked in syrup and left to dry overnight.
Amisha Gurbani's blood orange and hibiscus tartAmisha Gurbani/Supplied
Like other forms of preservation, candying is an resourceful way to reduce kitchen waste and prolong the too-short season of fruits – citrus candied during peak season in the winter can be enjoyed all summer long, so long as it’s been stored properly; nectarines can be candied and then dried to eat in winter, long after they’ve disappeared from local markets.
But at a time when food media is saturated with productivity hacks (such as delicious dinners that cook in just 10 minutes, or the slicing tool that will cut your prep time in half) requiring a home cook to wait overnight for anything is a big ask.
Wynne’s book Nature’s Candy includes a speedy method for candying small pieces of fruit with a strong cellular structure, such as cherries, clementines, kumquats or kiwi, that still need up to 45 minutes of cooking on the stove and then, ideally, an overnight rest. But to candy larger pieces – whole figs, grapefruit rounds, peach halves – it’s a process that can take three to four days (though only a little active cooking time).
Rather than rigid recipes, she offers guidelines for candying that challenge the home cook to rely on observation, practice and even failure to determine when their fruit is done.
“When you’re doing something at home, there’s so much beauty to having a ritual and practising patience and watching a slow transformation occur,” said Wynne. “The thing I try to impress upon people is that when it’s all about speed and efficiency, you lose out.”
If you’re sharing what you’ve made with someone, whether it’s days spent candying thick slices of Seville oranges that will eventually be dipped in tempered chocolate, or preparing Wynne’s stollen pound cake – a riff on the German Christmas bread bejewelled with a mix of diced candied fruit, “there’s so much love and care in it, because it did take time and foresight,” she says. “It’s about thoughtfulness, really.”
