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Healthy Candy: Dried Naked Citrus Is Your New Addictive Snack

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Healthy Candy: Dried Naked Citrus Is Your New Addictive Snack

Marie Viljoen January 27, 2025

What happens when you are gifted 10 pounds of tiny, sweet, Kishu mandarins? After the unboxing excitement subsides, the culinary wheels begin turning. Slightly larger than walnuts, these petite mandarins arrived at my door this winter. I was already in citrus mode, soaking long strips of pomelo peel in syrup before drying them gently in the lowest of ovens. That practice, and a flickering memory of a long-ago M.F.K. Fisher story about tangerines and snow and a radiator (see footnote), inspired what has become a current obsession: Peeled, dried citrus. Basically citrus candy, no sugar necessary. After three hours in gently balmy heat, the Kishus were transformed: complex, marmalade-rich (sweet, yet infinitesmally bitter), crisp outside, addictively sticky inside. I made another batch at once. Then I experimented with other, easy-peel citrus: the feather-light dried segments of larger mandarins, clementines, and satsumas were unstoppably good. Inhalable, like a bag of chips.

In short, these dried citrus seem to be that holy grail of snack foods: healthy candy. Here’s how to make them.

Photography by Marie Viljoen

Above: 10 lbs of Kishu mandarins, flanked by yuzu.

When I think—or, when I thought—of dried citrus, it’s of slices: orange, usually, in cross-section, with the skin. It’s crisp and quite bitter. But peeling then drying the whole fruit transforms it from freshly juicy to intensely marmalade-redolent and yieldingly chewy. The flavor and texture are compelling, and these tidbits of dried citrus could not be easier to make.

Drying peeled citrus whole, or in segments (for larger fruit) might deliver to your kitchen the guilt-free treat you have been longing for. They are high in fiber and minerals like calcium and potassium.

Other benefits? These dried citrus bonbons are a versatile, shelf-stable ingredient, and can be deployed beyond the realm of snacking: They’re a light-weight and satisfying road or trail food, can be stirred into breakfast granola, offer bittersweet contrast to smoothly sweet ice cream, and are intriguingly delicious paired with creamily escaping goat or cows milk cheese.

Above: Tiny Kishu mandarins have very thin skins and are exceptionally easy to peel.

There is only one caveat when drying easy-peel citrus: The fruit should be seedless. Crunching through the obstruction (and bitterness) of dried seeds in an otherwise impeccable mouthful feels like an affront.

Above: Because Kishu are so small, they can be dried whole in a low oven, after about three gentle hours.
Above: Parchment prevents the citrus from sticking to a baking sheet when some juice oozes out.
Above: After drying the Kishu has become a featherweight version of itself, while its flavor has intensified exponentially.
Above: Before and after—the loss of moisture shrinks the fruit, but amplifies the flavor.
Above: While the dried citrus are delicious eaten while warm, they keep indefinitely.
Above: The leftover peel is appealing in its own right, but that’s another story (come back next week).
Above: Segments of larger citrus can be used, too, as long as they are seedless.
Above: A crisp exterior, and a yielding stickiness trapped inside.

If the flavor of a just-peeled tangerine (for example) is juicily fresh, the impression of these unassuming little snacks after they have been oven-dried is sophisticated. Acidity has mellowed into a concentrated bite of marmalade, warmly sweet but braced by a trace bitterness. They are astonishingly good.

Dried Naked Citrus

Naked, because the key to this method is peeling. The larger the fruit, or the segments, the longer the drying-time will be. Check on the citrus after two hours. Tiny Kishu take just three hours at 200°F, while the satsuma segments shown above took five hours to dry. The fruit is ready when it feels dry to the touch, and has shrunk to about a quarter of its size. It should keep its orange color. You can dry for longer, but the sugars may begin to burn and turn it darker, and more bitter.

  • Any quantity of seedless, easy-peel citrus.

Preheat the oven to 200°F* or lower (150°F is fine). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Peel the fruit. If there are any white threads from the pith remaining, pull them off. Leaving some of them is fine (they add an interesting trace of bitterness). If the fruit is very small, like a Kishu or a petite clementine cultivar, leave it whole. For larger fruit, separate the segments. Arrange them on the baking sheet, with space between segments or fruit.

Leave them for two hours and then check. If see any brown patches of juice or the fruit turning brown the heat may be too high. Are they soft and plump or dry to the touch? If they are still soft leave them in the oven for another hour to three hours, depending on how large or small the pieces are. For your first attempt, check on them every hour. They are ready when they feel lightweight, are completely dry to the touch, and will still have some residual stickiness inside. They will have lost about three quarters of their fresh weight.

Serve warm or cool on a cheese plate, eat a snack, add dried segments to salads just before serving (like croutons, they should stay crisp), or add to yogurt and granola.

* If your oven cannot sustain this low a heat, 250 is fine as long as you turn the heat off for an hour after every hour that it has been on. Repeat until your citrus pieces taste like candy.

Footnotes:

  • The M.F.K Fisher story about tangerines is Borderland, in her collection Serve it Forth.
  • A medium box of easy-peel citrus from Rincon Tropics is $30.00
  • Tiny Kishu mandarins are sold at Flavors by Bhumi: $89.99 for 5lbs
  • You can grow your own Kishu. The trees are sold by Four Winds Growers: $60.00 for a 24 – 36-inch tree

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