SFist in the Kitchen: Mandarins
Oh my darling, Clementine!
Thou art lost and gone forever
Dreadful sorry, Clementine.
Maybe Huckleberry Hound always sang Oh My Darling, Clementine because he too was mourning a drowned love that he's replaced with her younger sister. But we think he started to sing it when he had to give up clementines and other mandarin oranges for the rest of the year.
Old Huck would be happy to know that they're back in force at local markets, assuming he noticed from the netherworld of TV scheduling. We love the way you can easily rip off the bumpy skin to expose the juicy flesh inside. It makes us feel like Willow in the "Villains" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Of course, she didn't then slurp up the small pieces and revel in the sweet, tart juice. So the metaphor only sort of works.
Photos by Melissa Schneider
We normally see satsumas at the market, but mandarin connoisseurs tend to favor the flavor of clementines. There are zillions of breeds within those two categories, but farmers probably won't give you specifics; inbreeding is rampant and it can be hard to suss out what's been planted. The family tree, with its Pixies and tangelos and tangors, makes the whole pluot/plumcot/aprium clan seem straightforward.
We love to eat plain mandarins as snack food, but they lend themselves to a variety of desserts. We adapted a recipe from Chez Panisse Fruit by infusing Marshall's Farm honey with a few rosemary leaves. Once we strained the leaves out of the warm honey, we drizzled it over slices of peeled mandarins and garnished with minced rosemary.
We used mandaran zest to flavor a batch of crème caramel, which we topped with finely chopped crystallized ginger and haphazardly drizzled with a white chocolate sauce. Pastry chef and blogger David Lebovitz advised us on the straightforward sauce: Melt white chocolate chunks and thin with a little water or low-fat milk (they make low-fat milk?) until the mixture has a good consistency. We liked the way the piquant, crunchy ginger contrasted with the smooth, eggy custard, but SFist photographer Melissa hopes that next time we'll make the dish with dark chocolate. Either way, we'd pair this dessert with an Orange Muscat dessert wine; we're partial to Quady's Essensia, but any good bottle would work.
We almost did the dark chocolate and orange thing when we considered adding Scharffen Berger cacao nibs to the mandarin sherbet we made. But in the end we decided to let the pure orange flavors sparkle forth on their own. Maybe next time.
How do you like your mandarins? Let us know in the comments.
Market notes: Did you hear that Dungeness crabs will finally be at local stores? Okay, just checking.