Candied Orange Peel

I have designated Friday as Kitchen Day. There are always chores to be done in the kitchen and grouping them together in one day seems an efficient way to tackle them...or procrastinating until Friday seems a more comfortable way to live, take your pick. The bottom drawer of my freezer in the kitchen is dedicated for collecting scraps of one kind and another. This is about the orange and satsuma peels I saved for a few weeks. 

I belong to a Facebook group about making do and mending - actually several groups - about sewing with scraps, up-cycling etc. Anyhow, one member talked about making candied orange peel with her scraps and her method really appealed because it wasn't fussed about removing the pith on the inside of the peel, a hassle that put me off the idea when I read it years ago in Tightwad Gazette. 

How do you like my replacement lid handle? A cork. Bill thought it ought
to be the fake cork instead of real cork but when he tried it, the thing melted.
I do love being right!

This involved boiling the peels until soft, then replacing the water and boiling for 20 minutes. You cut the peels into strips or whatever shape you like. Then you make up sugar syrup, 300 g sugar to 150 ml water. She didn't specify whether to use fresh water or that second boiling water so I did the later. Turns out it was supposed to be the former as boiling is to remove the bitterness. I didn't find my syrup in the least bitter, so I got away with it. She mentioned scaling up the syrup recipe and I wasn't sure how much I needed, so I made extra according to the amount of boiled orange water I had. This was a mistake as I had far too much! On the other hand, it tastes pretty nice and may be a great addition to some of my jellies. Or nice on cereal like we use rose hip syrup now. Over over ice cream perhaps? 

Anyhow, you pour the syrup over the sliced peels and cook over a low heat until the syrup is absorbed. The next time I do this I will make the minimum amount of syrup and see what happens. As I did it this time I had far too much and ended up drawing a lot of of it off. Then after a couple of hours I gave up and left it on the low heat only you know what I came back to...burnt orange syrup. 

The burnt ones are on the far side and they taste just as nice - maybe even
nicer - as the ones in the foreground.

I pulled out as many of the orange slices as I could, including some dark brown ones, and left the pot full of boiled water to soak. I carefully placed these slices on two cookie sheets and I put them in the front porch - the driest place in the house I could think of. Now drying foods in the north of England is sort of a race with the mould. I've heard of people's thick terry towels growing mould in winter, which is why I keep our tumble dryer in spite of the fact we only use it maybe twice a year for emergencies. 

The lady on Facebook said to turn the peels a few times to aid in drying and that it would take about 3 days. I turned them once, they were pretty much glued to the metal - turns out I should have put paper down first, she didn't mention that. However, on the third day they did come up pretty easily. Only they were still pretty sticky and I didn't want to keep them in the fridge as we would just eat them. (She told me this wasn't nibbling, it was Quality Control!). 

I must admit they strongly resemble worms - orange and brown sticky worms.
How appetising!

So I rolled each piece in regular sugar until it wasn't sticky anymore and placed them in jars (another reason to save them) and put them - 2 1/2 jars - in the chest freezer. I'm thinking they might make nice additions to the Christmas hampers we do each year for Bill's kids. However that might all work out this Christmas...

After being rolled in sugar they all look more the same, but now like
sugar-coated worms. They are delicious though!