RECYCLING THE RINDS

It’s been difficult to post anything what with the end-of-term academic scramble, the Black Friday sales, and the usual round of family and professional events that require my attendance, compounded by yesterday’s receipt of final proofs for a 200+ page scientific book that I have to go through to catch any new errors introduced by the publisher. Just when I was giving up hope of ever writing anything for the blog, Azar came to the rescue with a post on her candied pomelo rinds. I tasted them last week, and they’re delicious! I haven’t seen it, but what we need is pomelo essential oil for perfumery. 

Here’s Azar’s post:

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Fall and winter are usually very wet, cold and dark here in the Pacific Northwest.  Nevertheless I look forward to November and December, not so much for the holidays as for the seasonal advent of the new citrus crop.  I'm crazy for the zest, the colors, scents and flavors of navels, grapefruit, blood oranges, tangerines, mandarins, Honeybells, kumquats and their hybrids, the lemons and the limes (especially the Persian variety) and, of course, my all time favorite citrus fruit, the monster pomelo (AKA Citrus maxima, Citrus grandis, pummelo, lusho fruit, shaddock).

Pomelos range in size from 5 to over 10 inches in diameter.  These big guys look like extra large grapefruits varying in color from bright green to lemon yellow and weighing in anywhere from 2 to almost 5 lbs. per fruit.  The pink or yellowish flesh is crisp and sweet, but getting to the innards of a pomelo can be a real challenge.

To peel and segment a pomelo first chop off the ends, score the peel like you would a Valencia orange and then carefully peel the rind from the fruit.  The fragrant pith of a pomelo is colored like white and pink cotton candy and is thick, smooth and squishy to the touch.  Remove as much of the pith as possible, pull the fruit in half, score on the segment lines and break into natural segments.  Trim the edges of the segments and then insert a sharp fillet knife under each membrane and separate from the flesh as you would when skinning or filleting a fish.  With practice this will leave you with neat, ready to eat pomelo segments. I have to admit that I still need practice even after years of pomelos!

It always saddens me to throw away the peels, so this year I decided to turn the rinds into candied citron and use them in my version of that sadly misunderstood and maligned holiday staple, the fruitcake! I love fruitcake, from the scariest drugstore versions in the questionably decorated tins to the expensive, specialty fruitcakes individually prepared in homes and monasteries around the world.  Since I can no longer eat pecans, walnuts or commercial candied cherries and citron colored with "mad dog red No. 3", I will probably have to develop a fruitcake recipe using almonds and my own candied pomelo peels.

Azar's Candied Pomelo Peels

Ingredients:

peels from 1 large pomelo

1 cup white granulated sugar plus some additional sugar to coat the peels

1 cup water

Peel the pomelo and eat the flesh.  Remove most of the pith from the peels. Cut into ½ " strips.  Blanch the peels 3 to 5 times (or more) to soften and remove bitterness. Heat water and 1 cup sugar until clear, add the peels and simmer on low for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.  Transfer the cooked peels to a drying rack, cool and pat off the excess liquid.  Roll the rinds in the additional sugar (or shake them in a bag with the sugar) until coated.  Return the peels to the rack, put the rack on a parchment covered cookie sheet and dry the peels in a 160 degree F oven for 12 to 18 hours until the peels are slightly crisp and dry to the touch. Cool the rinds on the rack and store in Ziploc bags.  

Candied pomelo peels can be munched as is, dipped in semi sweet chocolate, chopped for use in spumoni ice cream or cannoli filling and, of course, added to your favorite fruitcake recipe. All of this talk about fruitcake brings to mind this holiday riddle:  Why is your grandfather's gold watch like your grandmother's fruitcake?

Happy Baking,

Azar xx

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And that’s it, folks! The cool thing is that you could do this with any citrus rinds and probably any sort of fruit. I assume that an answer to the riddle will be forthcoming.

[All photos are by Azar]

I SURVIVED BLACK FRIDAY!

One unfortunate aspect of my multifaceted lifestyle is that the end of the academic autumn quarter coincides with the ramping up of the winter holiday season. This means that just as the university gears up into end-of-term frenzy mode, I have to prepare for holiday sales, starting with Black Friday.

Over the years it seems that Black Friday has been extended into Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and on through the week as retailers try to lure in the more recalcitrant customers. It seems to me that three days, with a week’s advance notice, should be enough time for any customers who want to take advantage of discounts to do so. More spam in their mailboxes isn’t going to lure them in (Staples, I’m looking at you).

Every year I read the same dire articles in the press bemoaning the fact that retailers and the economy are suffering because “Black Friday sales are down”, meaning that instead of the projected-wishful-thinking 10% increase in sales over last year, sales only increased by 7%. There’s something fundamentally wrong with thinking that the economy must constantly grow in order to be healthy. But that’s an issue for another post.

This season I was much more prepared than I’ve been in the past, with plenty of stock on the shelves, plenty of shipping supplies, and a couple of days dedicated time to deal with filling orders. I only ran out of one thing, Tropic of Capricorn. I have to say that the whole experience was good, and that the process went much more smoothly than I expected.

Nearly all of the Black Friday orders have been shipped, so I can relax and prepare to launch the two new fragrances I’ve been working on, put together my spa set (soaps, bath oil, body balm and “room sprays” for the perfume-phobic), put together the winter 2014 Scents of the Season collection, and get ready to participate in a pop-up shop the weekend before Christmas. Oh yeah, and I have to grade a lot of exams and term papers, try to keep my orchids from freezing during the horrible cold weather that we’re having, and spend some quality time with my family.  Maybe there’ll be time for a blog post or two in between everything else.

I’m not complaining – I wouldn’t have it any other way!

[Dark snowy day photo grabbed from the webcam of our local ski area; Fight of the moneybags by Pieter van der Heyden, ca. 1550; snow on tree branches is my photo] 

HOARDERS, GROOMERS AND HIDERS

From time to time I take off and go walkabout in my neighborhood, exploring places I wouldn’t normally go. On one of these expeditions I decided to go check out a road that I hadn’t been on for several years. I think my neglect of this area was partly because it’s in an odd location, accessed from an intersection on a sharp curve on a steep hill with no sight distance in any direction from either road, and no shoulders to walk on initially. However, I think the main reason was that it’s not obviously a road, looking more like a driveway, and I just didn’t think to go there. Once on the road, it’s OK for walking, and actually provides some fascinating sights along the way.

The neighborhood is interesting because it’s a mosaic of older houses, probably built in the 1950s through 1970s, and new developments that have sprung up within the past 5 years or so. The older houses all have large lots and range in style from one that practically looks like a fancy country estate to rickety old buildings surrounded by a wasteland of weeds and blackberries. The new houses are crammed close together on small lots, and are all built in the currently popular style of a big rectangular wooden box with a faux-craftsman façade on the part of the front that isn’t occupied by a garage entrance. The feature that all of the houses have in common is way too many vehicles parked in front of them, not surprising I suppose given that this part of the county has no public transportation to speak of.

The real contrast, however, is between the houses that are clearly occupied by hoarders and those occupied by compulsively neat people, at least as regards the exterior of their dwellings. There are a surprising number of outdoor hoarder houses in this neighborhood. These are the houses where the front yard is completely filled with junk vehicles in various states of disrepair, old parts of buildings, rusty bits of ironwork, disintegrating plastic bags full of garbage, old sofas with moss growing on them, and other less vegetation-friendly furniture and appliances. We do have weekly garbage pickup, junkyards, and other disposal and recycling services, so I can’t help wondering why people collect garbage in their yards. I suppose it makes a fashion statement of some kind. Maybe they consider it art, which it could conceivably be if it were picked up on a truck and hauled to a museum so that it could be viewed with a card explaining its deep significance.

The people on the other end of the spectrum must spend all of their time (or someone else’s) grooming their property. There’s always a blanket of freshly trimmed bright green grass with not a leaf or twig in sight to mar its uniformity, a sidewalk of some sort, freshly swept so that there’s not a grain of sand in sight to mar its smoothness, and various shrubs severely pruned into symmetrical cubes or spheres, with not a leaf out of place. Poor plants. The people who spend enormous effort trying to hold back the tendencies of nature and rigorously control the landscape are as incomprehensible to me as the ones who place all of their long-discarded and decaying items on full display. Maybe they’re two ends on a circular spectrum of compulsion.

Somewhere in between these extremes, or off the spectrum, are the people who pimp out their yards with statuary, little ponds or fountains, trimmed-poodle trees, and labor-intensive annual flower beds, or the people who hide behind great walls of overgrown vegetation, needing a machete to get from the street to the front door, wherever it is.

As a person who owns an enormous number of perfumes in different forms, I have to think about how my perfume storage areas relate to the types of landscaping people choose. I don’t display any of my perfumes publicly, so maybe my perfume holding areas don’t even qualify because they’re more like the fenced private back yard that no one but family and good friends ever see. With bottles I’m probably most like the hoarder who keeps everything reasonably neatly piled in a closet, thinking I might use it some day. With samples, I’m like the geek collector who keeps everything neatly cataloged and accessible for perusal at any time. However, for every sample in my organized “library”, there are ten samples junked in disorderly boxes waiting to be tested, so there the junk-collector aesthetic applies.

What sort of perfume-keeper are you? Are you a public hoarder who puts your whole disorderly collection out in plain sight? Are you a groomer who lines your bottles up neatly in a display, maybe in alphabetical order or by size or color of bottle, and dusts them regularly? Do you pimp-out your perfume display with fancy shelves, ornaments, plastic flowers, or other accessories? Do you keep your stash hidden behind closed doors in a neat or disorganized condition? Is it art? 

[To avoid implicating anyone in my extended neighborhood, all photos are taken from Wikimedia] 

THE POLAR EVENT AND NEW MATERIALS

Just a little over a week ago we were experiencing the monsoon, but that came to a screeching halt when the “polar outbreak” happened weekend before last. Last year the disgusting cold snap was called the “polar vortex”, but that name seems to have fallen out of favor in the media. In any case, it’s a phenomenon that apparently is caused by global anthropogenic climate change, due in this case to a major hurricane (aka typhoon) off the coast of Alaska.

Overnight, the still-green leaves on the tender, growing trees and plants were flash-frozen and freeze-dried. This wasn’t just a little dusting of frost, it was a hard freeze, with temperatures as low as 28F (-2C)! The worst thing was that everything was completely waterlogged, so I expect there will be some major damage in the garden when the final tally comes in. Weather like this happens occasionally in December and January, after plants are acclimated to the cold, but not in early November. The only positive aspect of the whole debacle is that it’s sunny during the day (what there is of it) so the greenhouse is warmed a little by the sun.

I’ve been continuing my evaluation of the new perfume materials that I got, so thought I’d share some of my notes here.

Shangralide is a musk base with super longevity. It's supposed to be similar to deer musk. It starts out with a characteristic moist, quasi-floral musk scent and stays that way for quite a long time. To me it seems softer and “squisiher” than a lot of the other musks. After more than a month on paper it dries down to a faint, slightly soapy residue.

Animalis is something that I’ve been wanting to try for a long time, and finally got my hands on. It’s an odd one. It starts off with a slightly off-putting “perfumey” scent, like the old hippie formula,  “Egyptian musk”. After a while, though, it does a complete about-face and turns into a truly animalic scent that resembles civet, slightly fecal and – well – animalic is the best description. At this point, I really like it as a base material, and I’m sure I’ll end up using it. After more than month, the Egyptian musk smell comes back, faintly, having come full circle.

DMBCB (I won't burden you with the chemical name) is supposed to smell like green, floral, woody plum, but what I get is something like plum mixed with old coffee grounds. It could be useful in the proper context, but it’s not very pleasant on its own.

Sandalwood Oliffac was something of a disappointment, but I’m used to that when it comes to synthetic versions of sandalwood. It once again confirmed that there’s nothing like the real thing. More than anything else, it smells like mushroom or moist fungus, and reminds me a lot of Bruno Acampora Musc, which smells like some type of fungus. Maybe that scent was overdosed with this version of synthetic sandalwood. I can see uses for it in creating an earthy mushroom fragrance or as a component in a sandalwood accord, but not as a direct replacement for sandalwood. 

I’ve got a couple of new fragrances just about ready to release, so will be sending them to my testers as soon as I get a chance to prepare samples and package them up. 

Have you suffered damage from the latest unseasonable cold spell? 

[Dead fig leaves and fruits photo is mine, the rest are from Wikimedia] 

NEW TOYS IN MONSOON SEASON

Every autumn Seattle experiences a monsoon season that peaks in November and December. After living here for going on 20 years, I’m fully aware that it always rains at this time, but this year has been ridiculous, with wave after wave of storms bringing torrential rain and wind. This morning I woke up to see a clear, golden sky that, combined with the bright yellow leaves of the trees, gave everything a magical glow. I thought we might get a break in the rain, but no such luck. Five minutes later it was almost as dark as night, with buckets of rain pouring down again, and the wind tearing at the gold-tinged leaves of the big-leaf maple outside my widow.Monsoon clouds in Seattle look exactly like the picture of monsoon clouds in India (photo below).

The monsoon season comes with its own distinctive smells. Mostly it’s mud and water and newly decaying leaves that have fallen. There’s also fallen fruit that’s rotting and fermenting. For some reason this scent is particularly strong at night. The scent that wafts from the lavender changes from pungent to sweetly floral, and is especially strong in neighborhood areas where people have just pruned their lavender shrubs.

To brighten up this gloomy time of year, I recently got in a set of new perfume materials to test. Most of them are base notes that have persisted on my test strips for 3 weeks and are still going strong. The only one that was a mid or top note was Sagecete, which is supposed to smell like clary sage, but fruitier. I found it strange and a little off-putting, with aspects of bitter herbs, fruitiness, and an odd metallic component. I’m not sure how it would fit into a perfume, but the sharp metallic note might be used to good effect in certain compositions.

Clearwood is another one of those woody-ambery materials, touted as a “patchouli replacer” or a “clean” version of patchouli. It’s quite nice, with aspects of patchouli, cedar, and wet dirt. Longevity is moderate, so it would fall somewhere in the bridging space between mid- and base notes. I can envision using it when I want a clean, mineral-y woody-patchouli-cedar note.

Patchoulyl acetate is another patchouli-type material made by acetylation of patchouli essential oil and subsequent fractional distillation. It’s one of those materials that falls in the no-man’s-land between natural and synthetic. Basically, it smells like patchouli, but lighter, less earthy, and more diffusive. It has better longevity on paper than Clearwood. It would be a nice choice in a composition where there is a need for the sharpness of patchouli without the usual quasi-animalic, earthy aspects.

Aldron is supposed to be an animalic note, but to me it smells more like a super-strength benzene-based industrial metal cleaner or lubricant, powerful and persistent, laced with a little pinch of cumin. Perfumer & Flavorist states that there is a high degree of variability in how individuals perceive Aldron, with impressions ranging from “clean and woody” to “animalic and sweat-like”. It has the popular reputation of smelling like a man’s sweat. I can see how any of these interpretations might fit, but the problem is that all of them do to some degree, but are not the whole picture. 

Aldron has a smell all its own, and could be used to give a subtle animalic touch to woody accords or a sharp, pungent touch to animalic compositions. It has amazing longevity, and would definitely help anchor the base notes of a fragrance, especially one that uses cumin. It’s worth playing with when I create my super-animalic perfume. 

[All photos are from Wikimedia. It was too rainy to take photos this morning!]