I have never eaten a tangelo before, not that I remember. But for the last week, I have had five juicy specimens giggling at me from my fruit bowl. I bought them because my aim is to cook more frequently with fruits and vegetables that are in season, and tangelos were an unknown and exciting option.
I wasn’t sure what to do with them, so I left it up to the interwebs to decide and googled ‘tangelo cake’. (Yes, so I left it mostly up to the interwebs). I found that Stephanie Alexander’s tangelo tree produced a dozen fruits in July 2010. I found that the fruit is a hybrid of the tangerine and the grapefruit and is “juicy at the expense of flesh”. That was intriguing. I also found a recipe for a Tangelo and Cinnamon Upside Down Cake. It was from taste.com.au and I wasn’t sure at first whether to trust an unnamed, i.e. non celebrity cook, source (recipe snobbery?) but I love citrus and cinnamon so I set a date with those tangelos.
The image featured above is the result. It was delicious, even though I didn’t have the time to concoct the finishing caramel sauce. The highlight for me was the crunchy pine nut and cinnamon base.
I discovered that tangelos have more sweet in them than tart, which I was curious about given their derivation from grapefruits. The “… at the expense of flesh” comment I read online must refer to the thick, softness of the skin and the “juicy…” comment refers to the way you can squeeze them in your hand and the juice just slooshes out of the fruit, almost as if you’re squeezing a sponge. They peel apart very easily in segments, similar to a mandarin.
One of my favourite cooking companions is The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit. While she doesn’t include tangelos specifically, I looked up her entries under Orange to see what flavour hints might inspire me to extend my August tangelo experience. Some of her sweet orange flavour entires inspired me:
• Try a bouquet garni of tangelo zest, bay leaf, parsley and thyme in a slow cooked beef dish
• Use coriander seed in a tangelo syrup to top tangelo segments for layers of citrus flavour
• Add the juice of the tangelo to a white fish sauce and use with a firm, strong flavoured fish
I highly recommend you source Segnit’s book for a little more detail and a lot more inspiration.
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