Yuzu season

The first green yuzu fruit are on the young, potted tree on our terrace. Citrus x juno is a cross between a wild citrus and a mandarin-type orange, hailing from either Korea or northern China around a millennium ago. Mine came a little more recently from Four Winds Growers in... Let's figure it out:

I-know-we-were-living-here-so-late-2018-aka-the-year-from-hell-but-was-it-then-no-probably-spring-2019-hang-on-a-second-NO-WAY!-it-was May-2020! (Thank goodness for emails.)

In other words: Pandemic Purchase. A good one.

The dilemma is: Do I harvest the green yuzu now, when they are unripe, microplane their intensely perfumed green zest from their hard round bodies, and make yuzu kosho (above), the powerful Japanese condiment that transforms everything it touches? (My earlier recipe is in the prickly ash chapter of Forage, Harvest, Feast - now, I tend to ferment it.)

Or do I wait for them to ripen, turn yellow, and then make the very-very delicious Korean-style yuja-tea - the ripe slices macerated in sugar (which is what I do to just about every fragrant thing I forage), the slices-plus-sugar forming a slow syrup while candying the yuzu. (That would be around December or January, when our tree will be back indoors, and I may be in Cape Town, universe and virus variants willing.)

The syrup is wonderful in hot black tea, very fragrant; and delicious in icy drinks, too. I eke out my jarful from last January, made from ripe yuzu bought at Eataly in Manhattan. I soaked the squeezed yuzu fruit - still very perfumed - in gin to make the most of them, too. It's some good gin.

If you'd like to try yuzu and don't grow your own, there are more and more sources, thanks to small growers beginning to expand their citrus flocks. It's illegal to import the fresh fruit from Japan, where most yuzu is grown (because of citrus pest and disease issues; nothing to do with Japan, and everything to do with protecting the local and major citrus economies from pathogens. That's also why you can't buy trees from US growers if you live in certain states - citrus lockdown).

Try the New Jersey-based Bhumi Growers. Or Suzuki Farms, Delaware.  And Californian Mud Creek Ranch sells via the distributor, Fruitstand.

It's hard to walk away once the citrus bug has bit.

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Walks