#candying

The recipe starts out by having you soak the etrog for seven days. I did not do this. I am far too impatient to wait another week to candy this thing, and none of the other recipes say anything about soaking it.

After that, you're supposed to boil the etrog seven times for 20 minutes each time, which is supposed to remove some of the fruit's bitterness. This I did do. (The other recipes only had you boiling it three times for 10 minutes each, but I really didn't want to be stuck with bitter candied etrog.)

Boiling the etrog so many times dulled the color and left it with something of a soft, spongy texture, which made me a little nervous because the tip started to sort of fall apart around the fourth or fifth boiling, and I was afraid the whole thing would start to disintegrate. But it didn't!

By this point, it was late evening, so I decided to save the rest for the next day.

I started out by slicing the etrog. I'm pretty sure the brighter outline is the peel while the the thick layer of yellow between that and the pulp is the pith; I guess boiling it turned it yellow.

I can confirm that etrogim are super bitter. I'm not sure whether or not boiling it so many times reduced the bitterness at all because I didn't try it before boiling it, but the pulp sure was bitter when I sliced it. It smelled very nice, though.

This recipe essentially wants you to candy the etrog twice, which is interesting. It claims that the syrup you end up with after the first candying is bitter and should be discarded, while all the other recipes I found only have you candying it once and suggest saving the syrup to turn into soda or add to alcoholic beverages or baked goods.

Then I made a simple syrup on the stove with one cup of water and one cup of sugar (this recipe doesn't call for a 1:1 ratio of water to sugar, but I figured it's pretty close, and I would have had to cut the recipe into thirds anyway because it calls for 3-4 etrogim and I only have the one), then I added the slices of etrog and let it simmer for one hour.

And after that, I let it sit for another four hours.

Then I went to drain the etrog slices so I could boil them in a second round of simple syrup and discovered that the syrup had dried and thickened to the point where the etrog slices were glued to the bottom of the pot 🙃

So I went back and double checked the recipe, and it turned out that the mixture of water and sugar it had called for was much less 1:1 than I'd thought.

Oh well.

(In my defense, some of the other recipes did call for a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water.)

So I pried all the slices of etrog out of the pot and discarded what remained of the syrup because there was no way I was getting that out of the pot in any usable form. I can, however, say that it wasn't really all that bitter...but I'm starting to think that I don't much care for the flavor of etrog >.<

(A good soak in some hot water took care of the pot quite nicely.)

At this point, the recipe says to simmer the etrog slices in a mixture of 2 cups of sugar and 1 1/2 cups of water (and 2 tbsp of corn syrup, but I don't have any of that so I just skipped it, since a different recipe described the corn syrup as "optional") for 30 minutes. After the previous debacle, I decided that a mixture that is so much more sugar than water would be even more likely create another sticky mess (and I still didn't want to bother to cut the recipe into thirds), so I once again used a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water.

And then I let it sit for another four hours, but this time, I kept a closer eye on it. Because it had only simmered for half the time this time around, I had no issues with the slices gluing themselves to the bottom of the pot (using a smaller pot may have helped as well).

Once those four hours were up, I removed the slices from the pot and laid them out on a cookie rack (on top of some wax paper to catch the syrup drips) for an hour or two. While waiting for them to dry, I strained the syrup and put it in a squeezy bottle for later use.

Once they were mostly dry, I tossed them in sugar (which isn't part of the recipe I used, but it is part of some of the others I found) and put them on a clean cookie rack to finish drying overnight. Some of the recipes said to keep the excess sugar because it'll take on the flavor of the etrog, but I didn't really notice the flavor, and I don't have much use for etrog sugar anyway.

Because I had work the next day, I let them sit out until I got home, before tossing them in sugar again (which I don't think made a difference) and put them in a tupperware.

The Verdict

★★★☆☆