#Some smell a little more chemically but the ones that smell or look like marmalade or hazelnut butter are tempting | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yaldabaothadeez · 1 day

Text

Sichuan Pepper Marmalade

Or: a surprisingly workable idea, executed poorly by an idiot

About a year ago, I made a post talking about how Sichuan pepper (henceforth: huajiao, English needs a shorter term) is a close relative of the citrus fruits and wondering if it can be used for some of the same things (and also if it can hybridize - seems like no)

This post documents my attempt to make marmalade using only huajiao, water and sugar (mostly to differentiate myself from other attempts)

tl;dr - I messed it up a bit, but I think someone more competent than me (possibly including me in the future) could make it work with minimal "cheating".

Long version under the cut

I revived this idea because I'd gotten my hands on some fresh huajiao:

pictured here along with why it's sometimes called "prickly ash", all the larger twigs have those thorns.

While stabbing myself only a little, I managed to separate the fruit from most of the twigs

you might notice some of the fruit have shriveled a little, and others have gone black - fresh is a relative term, but this will be the least of my problems.

Most marmalade recipes call for the fruit to be sliced up thin (sometimes separating the pith and skin) to, among other things, help get the pectin out.

Does huajiao have any appreciable amount of pectin? Not a clue, but I decided to roughly chop about half of the huajiaos with a kitchen knife

^like this

at this point, the relation to citrus fruit was very obvious, that chopped up mess above smelled more like limes than the dried huajiao I'm used to.

So I tipped this into a pot with some water and a 500g bag of sugar-First mistake: I used far too much water for the amount of fruit/sugar I had, so I ended up boiling this for ages, to the presumable detriment of the taste.

-the water initially turned faintly green (and dipping my finger in, tasted extremely strongly of huajiao) but soon began to become more of a yellow-brown colour.

During the initial stages of boiling there was another distinctly citrusy smell - this one more like pommelo/grapefruit than anything else - but unfortunately that faded before the liquid had reduced enough.

As mentioned I'd used too much water, and was also worried that the huajiao would take time to release whatever little pectin it had, so I left this boiling for quite some time, until the volume had reduced significantly and it had spent a few minutes boiling in a way that didn't look like pure water (Second mistake: I'm pretty sure I slightly burned the sugar doing this) - by the end, it looked like this

the boiled huajiao had all turned black - those paler bits are a handful of dried huajiao I decided to throw in on a whim, and the green specks are a few I reserved until just then.

Under the standard cold plate test, this did seem to have set, but I don't know how to tell if this was due to pectin in the huajiao, or just reducing a sugar syrup enough.

Here's some in a little bowl, so you have a better idea what it looked like

appetizing, huh?

How does it taste? Not bad, but surprisingly bland. The liquid itself has a fairly mild huajiao flavor - the (crunchy but very much edible) chunks are much stronger.

I like it: I finished off that sample above with a slice of bread, but you could have achieved almost the same effect by adding some dried huajiao powder to a sugar syrup (and if you're familiar with certain sichuanese snacks, you know that's already a thing).

However: this could easily be much better - there were clearly a lot of tasty volatile chemicals in there that I just cooked to death. If I'd started with significantly less water, and boiled this for the absolute minimum time necessary, the results could have been much more interesting.

...except maybe it wouldn't have set. If anyone wants to try this themselves, I suggest cheating a little and taking the membranes from an actual citrus fruit (pomelo?) for the pectin - and maybe the flesh too, huajiao has no juice, and so no acid, that's probably not helping the taste.

5 notes · View notes

inga-don-studio · 2 years

Text

The nonbinary urge to smear pomade on your morning toast.

#I probably shouldn’t style my hair when I’m hungry…#I just … it all smells so good? I have a bunch of pomades that I’m working through to see what works best and they all smell & look tasty?#Especially my current favorite (Uppercut Deluxe Clay) that smells like toasted macadamias?#Some smell a little more chemically but the ones that smell or look like marmalade or hazelnut butter are tempting #The forbidden smear #(We’re not even going to get into the bergamot clove or orange blossom pomatums using Victorian recipes- I wanna cook with those)

4 notes · View notes

lazyevaluationranch · 3 years

Text

On a post about the Blue Haired Girlfriend's quixotic citrus breeding experiments, @voidingintotheshout asked:

I mean, if you wanted a hearty citrus relative, why didn’t you just grow Osage Orange? They can grow as far north as Michigan which is surely further north than anyone could reasonably expect to grow a citrus tree. They’re not edible but then hearty orange isn’t either. Osage Orange are so cool and such a interesting historical plant from the Shelterbelt era of American agriculture. Apparently they do smell like citrus.

This is part three of three. Part one. Part two.

Now you've done it! It's time for A Very Brief (But Also Insufficiently Brief) History of Twentieth Century Hardy Citrus Cultivation! Growing citrus trees this far north is kind of nuts, it's true, but I promise you it is not even close to the weirdest things people have done to grow citrus in places where the citrus doesn't think it should grow.

A note: This post will written using the Swingle citrus taxonomy system, including things that are definitely wrong. The citrus taxonomic tree looks like that one box of orphaned computer cords I keep moving with me to new houses "in case I need them" except some sort of adorable five-dimensional kitten has entertained herself with them and some of the resulting knots are not technically possible in our space-time continuum.

The powers that be gave us citrus because nothing pleases them like seeing a geneticist cry.

1. The Migrant Trees

The Soviet Union wanted lemons for tea, and they wanted to be independent enough not to have to trade with anyone else to get them, which meant they wanted to grow their own citrus. That part of the world is not a great place to grow plants that die when the temperature goes below zero, but at the foundation of the Soviet Union, there were citrus orchards in the warmest part of Georgia, along the Black Sea. Specifically, there was about, uh, one and a half square kilometers of somewhat implausible citrus orchard.

Hang on, it is about to get way less plausible.

This is the great citrus migration: any tree that did well in one spot, they'd try planting its seeds a few kilometres further north, or a few kilometres further east. Prizes were offered for breeding hardier citrus. Slowly the orchards spread, but they were extremely weird orchards.

It's usually a few degrees warmer at ground level than up in the air, and there's way less wind. So as the trees grew, they were bent over and tied along the ground. Some of them had the central trunk run in a straight line along the ground, with branches spreading out from it like the leaves of a fern, like an espaliered tree on its side. Others were starfish shaped, with the central trunk looped down until it ended up next to the base, and the branches sprawling out along the ground from the centre like starfish legs. The citrus trees were no taller than particularly vigorous strawberry plants, but they survived the winters, and you could throw a blanket over them to help them stay warm.

None of that helped if the ground froze solid, so they needed Underground Citrus. You'd dig a ditch, down below the lowest area where the ground froze, and you'd plant flat Starfish Trees or Flat Frond Trees running along the bottom of it, too deep to freeze. In winter, you'd just cover the ditch with boards any time the temperature was expected to go below freezing - citrus would tolerate the lack of light, but not the cold. Mandarins (Citrus reticulata) seemed to do best, so that’s most of what was grown.

It is a nearly unimaginable amount of work to grow citrus this way, along the bottoms of pits and trenches. We are experimentally trying to grow a Soviet-developed mandarin breed of unknown parentage, Shirokolistvennyi, but we will definitely not be putting in that level of effort.

2. The Mixed Up Trees

There are a couple species of citrus that tolerate cold well, but taste awful. A lot of effort has gone into crossbreeding them with more edible citrus. The results are ... mixed.

The Ichang Papeda (Citrus cavaleriei) generally survives temperatures down to -18 degrees C. It is stoic and calm and has mastered emptiness. Unfortunately, it has mastered emptiness too well. The fruit smells like lemons, with maybe a hint of rose, but there's nothing to eat here. It has a rind and seeds. No juice, no flesh.

(Photo by Michael Saalfield)

The Ichang Papeda is the parent or grandparent to several delicious, extremely sour Asian citrus types. Yuzu/yuja smells like grapefruit and clean wet stones from the bottom of a fast-flowing stream. Sudachi smells like grapefruit and leaves with dew on them. (I haven't met kabosu or any other papeda hybrids personally, but they are numerous.) They're all too sour to eat plain, unless you really need to turn your face inside out for some reason, but make for excellent flavouring.

(We have a yuzu tree and a sudachi tree and they're surviving, but no fruit yet.)

Trifoliate orange (Poncirus trifoliata) can survive temperatures down to -30 degrees C. This may be partly because, uniquely amoung citrus, they can drop leaves in autumn or winter and regrow them in spring, like a maple tree. They also produce an internal antifreeze. They are angry, twisted, thorny little plants that yell swears when you walk past them. They make a great hedge. The fruit is furry, smells like flowers and pine trees and taste like burnt, bitter plastic. It may or may not be possible to breed the horrible taste completely out of trifoliate oranges without losing cold-hardiness, if it's due to their antifreeze chemicals. Here’s Stabby:

(Photo by Rob Hille)

Even the least terrible trifoliate crossbreeds are bitter enough to qualify as “acquired tastes.” There are recipes for trifoliate marmalade: put a dozen trifoliate oranges, a kilogram of sugar, and a kilogram of pebbles in a pot, cook until it gels, then sieve out the oranges and eat the pebbles.

We are growing a trifoliate orange / minneola orange hybrid. And, of course, someday our own trifoliate hybrids. The Blue Haired Girlfriend planted 200 trifoliate oranges a couple years ago. There are fewer now, but the survivors have lived through two winters of snow and frost, and they might have somehow gotten more stabby. We're going to breed them, to each other or to less angry fruit, try and make something new and good from them.

I've limited this post to twentieth century hardy citrus breeding, but I have to give a shoutout to somatic hybridization, a decidedly twenty first century technique, where you take a cell from each of two different plants, remove their cell walls, put them next to eachother, and shock them with electricity until they merge into a single cell whose nucleus contains all genes from both plants. Then the new plant is like, "Wow, I guess these are all my genes? It seems like a lot, haha, but it's not like somebody made me from dismembered body parts and electricity, that is not how science works. Anyway I guess it's time to do some plant stuff now."

3. The Mutant Trees

In the 1950s, people started using radiation to randomly scramble the genes of plants. You'd irradiate seeds enough to change the genes somehow, and then you'd have to plant them to see what had happened. Maybe it was people horrified by the atomic bomb desperately wanting to find some life-supporting use for atomic fission, maybe it was government-supported cold war "atom bombs are good actually, look how many we have, USSR" propaganda. Probably both.

This time period also saw serious plans for Orion, a spaceship with a huge metal plate for a butt, intended to be propelled by exploding atomic bombs under it, which I am not actually making up.

Thousands of people in Europe and the US signed up to receive seeds with random mutations in the mail, plant them, and report back on what they heck they grew into and if it had any useful weirdness. (The gamma radiation used to mutate the seeds did not make them radioactive themselves - the seeds were completely safe.) There were also more formal and carefully controlled university research programs in China, Japan, and the US, where plants where grown in a circular research garden with a coverable radiation source at the centre, so that the farther you got from the centre, the less radiation the plants got. Radiation breeding is less popular than it used to be, but Japan still has a very productive citrus radiation breeding program.

The most popular radiation-bred citrus is the "Rio Red" grapefruit and its offspring, which has a much deeper red than non-mutant red grapefruit.

There aren't many radiation-developed citrus breeds noted for cold-hardiness - with radiation you get whatever you get - but there are a few, and I want one just because I think they're neat, a monument to that lovely human vision that looks at terrible weapons and somehow sees glossy-leaved trees with bright fruit.

4. The Monster Trees

Citrus are usually grown via grafting. That is, you plant a seed from a fast-growing sturdy breed, you let it grow roots and all that, and then you cut the top off and replace it with a branch from a more delicious breed. The two citruses grow together, and you end up with a tree that's disease and cold resistant in the roots, below the graft, but makes tasty fruit above the graft.

Occasionally, this process goes Wrong.

The first recorded instance is the tree called Bizarria, discovered in 1640. Someone attempted to graft a sour orange branch onto a citron. But instead of a clean line between sour orange branches and citron roots, the graft was damaged somehow, and the two different species of cells got tangled and mixed through the whole tree. It has branches that produce citron fruit. It has branches that produce sour orange fruit. And it has branches that produce, uh ... these:

(Photo by Labrina)

Most graft chimeras are made accidentally, when the graft site is damaged. Trifoliate orange is often used as rootstock, so there are many reported chimeras involving trifoliate orange and a nicer fruit. The mixed-up cells can be arranged a lot of ways, but it's possible to have the outside layer of the tree be trifoliate orange, and the core of the tree be the other citrus (periclinal chimera). This means you could theoretically get a tree with frostproof trifoliate leaves and branches, but fruit that doesn’t taste like burnt plastic rolled in quinine.

This lucky monstrosity has, in fact, reportedly happened. Twice. There is the Prague Citsuma, discovered in a greenhouse in Prague and suspected to have been created by a Soviet breeding program. And then there is the Hormish, discovered in China and thought to have been made by frostbite messing up the clean lines of the graft. The Blue Haired Girlfriend has managed to track down budwood from the Prague Citsuma - I’m so excited! - so we'll see how the fierce thorny monster tree with a heart of gold, or at least heartwood of gold, does for us.

5. Conclusion

Humans have been trying to grow citrus trees where they don't belong for nearly two thousand years, at least since the Jewish Diaspora and people trying to grow holy etrog trees - trunks gnarled as barnacle stones and the whole tree scented like the best dream you can't remember - in Europe. Maybe longer.

The Blue Haired Girlfriend's citrus-breeding schemes aren't going to singlehandedly transform Canada into a net citrus exporter. But history shows us: it might be possible to have a little gleaming sweetness from the stony ground here, with the ravens and the fir trees and the auroras. A sweetness we made ourselves, that exists nowhere else.

Or maybe we'll just have a bunch of weird inedible fruit. I don't know, but it's worth finding out, worth weaving together leaf and thorn and stone and the light of our hands as the years unwind. Worth it to have a quixotic project we can expect to spend decades on together, hands and hearts. This is how home is made, sometimes, with a balcony full of angry thorny little trees that shout swears at passerby.

#part three of three #so much doesn't fit in this post #fog gardening #how lemons started the mafia #etrogs in diaspora #citropsis and the african citrus species #we are still discovering new citrus species in oceania!#who knows what we'll make?#and one day we'll scoop up hydrocarbons from Titan's stormy seas and polymerize them and make huge bubble greenhouses filled with citrus #small children will fling squishy citrus at their siblings by the coiled light of Jupiter #which is as it should be #thank you voidingintotheshout for an excuse for all sorts of ranting

837 notes · View notes

insfiringyou · 4 years

Text

BTS - Home Again (J-Hope x Nana)

Hoseok and Nana spend an evening together following his discharge from the military, reflecting on the events a week prior at a group dinner and on their love for one another.

This fic is set about a week later after ‘A Reunion’, where Jeong-Sun (Suga’s girlfriend) is introduced to the whole group for the first time. There are mentions of events relevant to the fic that may not make sense if you haven’t read it. Mentions also of Young-Soon, Min-Seo and Jeong-Sun within.

Contains: Fluff and brief mentions of sex.

You can find out more about our headcanon universe and ongoing storyline here and more about our headcanon girlfriends here.

To read each member & their girlfriend’s headcanon universe fics in order, follow the links here: RM / Jin / Suga / J-Hope / Jimin / V / Jungkook & our full masterlist can be found here

Content below the cut

Slipping his phone back into his pocket, Hoseok turned the key and silenced the engine. Despite her insistence that she would only be a few minutes, it had been several, and he wondered what kind of errand his girlfriend had suddenly had to do in this part of town. He had thought at first that she had mixed up her class’ assignments, before remembering that her bag was sat in the backseat and had been noticeably lighter than usual. She had asked him to come up to the third floor without explanation; his worry vanishing at once when Nana’s distinct, squeaky laugh echoed from down the hall along with one that was soft and familiar.

“Hi, Hoseok.” Young-Soon regarded him warmly as he approached, her bare face glowing with amusement. Her dark hair was tied in a messy braid over one shoulder, and she clutched her loose cardigan to her waist. She had clearly been enjoying a day off, looking vastly more comfortable in her casual home attire than she had a week earlier at the restaurant. The chemical smell of lemon cleaning products drifted from the open door of her apartment.

“Oh, I didn’t realise you lived here! Wow, there’s a lot of stairs.”

“I’m sorry, the elevator is usually out of order…” She smiled, eyes flickering mischievously back to the taller woman.

“She was just telling me about how they caught some teenagers jamming the doors yesterday.” Nana grinned, squeezing her boyfriend’s fingers as they curled automatically around her own.

“Yeah. Apparently it’s a hot make-out spot.” She smirked. “I could hear the boy’s mother yelling at him from across the building when the engineer finally managed to open them. I don’t think she approves of his girlfriend very much.”

“Kids always find a way around their parent’s rules…” Nana sighed knowingly. “It’s usually better to just let them lose interest on their own.”

“Much less fun that way, though.” Young-soon grinned, and Nana giggled in response. Hoseok smiled, a little nonplussed, at the two. The conversation had clearly lost him, though it was apparent now why she had been taking so long.

“Anyway, I have them here …are you sure you can manage?”

She nodded in response, her auburn curls springing forward as she reached for the smaller of the two boxes, resting it against her hip. “Can you take the other one?”

“What is it?” Hoseok eyed it with suspicion, the weight surprising him as he picked it up. “Where’s JK?” He asked, with a raised eyebrow.

“He pulled a muscle. He’s sleeping it off.”

“How did he do that?”

She apparently didn’t hear, but met the other woman’s eyes with an impish look that said otherwise. A pink blush had crept up on her cheeks; Nana returned her shy smile, hoping that she hadn’t been a nuisance in dropping by unannounced.

She pressed on. “Are you sure you don’t want anything for them? I feel kind of bad just taking them without paying you.”

“I’ve been trying to get rid of them for ages.” Young-soon answered dismissively, toying with the end of her braid. “There’s only so many times you can give your friends a candle for their birthday or Christmas before it becomes embarrassing.”

“Thanks, I really appreciate it. We’re going to head off now.”

“Bye Young-Soon! Take care of Jungkook.”

“Of course. See you later.”

“Please be careful,” Nana pleaded, shutting the front door awkwardly behind herself. There was a soft tinkle as she dropped her keys into the dish on the console table beside her.

“I’m trying.” He steadied himself, edging a little more cautiously through the narrow hall, having almost tripped over an umbrella. She nudged it aside with her foot, knowing he was likely to trip over it again later. He had to duck to avoid the overhanging leaves above his head. “Your tree got so big.”

“It’s a Yucca. I’ve been meaning to trim him down a little bit but it seems a shame. He’s got beautiful leaves.”

“It’s a he?” Hoseok asked with amusement as he edged into the kitchen and set the box with a relieved sigh on the nearest, slightly rickety chair.

“Don’t worry. You don’t need to be jealous.”

Nana set her own box down and opened it up, searching through the meticulously bubble wrapped contents, extricating a large glass jar filled with pink fragrant wax. She uncapped the lid with a satisfying pop, inhaling the sweet scent of peony. Hoseok frowned slightly in bemusement; he wondered whether the recent stormy weather had been causing power cuts in her neighbourhood too. “What are you going to do with these?”

“Plant them.” Nana replied dryly, capping it once again. “There should be some space under the sink.”

“Are you sure? It seems full to me.”

“I’ve been meaning to make some jam…” She muttered in weak explanation, eyeing the open cabinet.

“There’s enough jars here for the entire of Seoul.” He teased, lips curling with incredulity.

“Don’t exaggerate Hobi, it’s not that many.” She said softly, getting to her knees as she started to rearrange the haphazardly stacked glass. Hoseok leant back against the table, equally impressed and surprised that she had somehow been able to fit the contents of the smaller box in the space. It seemed she had admitted defeat on the larger, pushing the chair more snugly against the table.

“Maybe I should make some for Young-Soon, since she gave me all these.” Nana mused,tucking her hair back behind her ears. It’d been years since she’d made jam, but she thought she could remember how. Her father had a habit of buying too much fruit from the market back in Gwangju, which they’d have to find creative ways to use. “And maybe Min-Seo might like some…she mentioned she’s been craving sweet things.”

“I think she’d like that. I just can’t believe they’re going to be parents.”

“Me neither. I can tell they’ll be great though. ”The younger woman had looked both overjoyed and embarrassed following the announcement shortly after dessert. Her voice had wavered slightly as she looked to her husband, Jin’s own expression soft with pride as he finished the sentence she had been struggling to say. Nana had hugged them both as they left for their taxi, Min-Seo thanking her with a shy, but delighted smile as she drew away from the sharp edge of her collar bone.

She flicked on the kettle, selecting a few empty marmalade jars as she began to stack them on the side. “I thought so ever since their wedding.”

Hoseok’s eyes followed her lovingly as she moved about, searching for a clean tea towel. “Did you like Jeong-Sun?”

“She seems really nice. It’s good to see Yoongi with someone.” Nana smiled, pouring boiling water in each jar before drying them thoroughly and laying them upside down on the draining board. The couple had visited the older member’s apartment a few times together prior to his enlistment, and it had always struck her how eerily empty and un-lived in it had felt. Bachelor life hadn’t seemed to suit Yoongi, and she hoped sincerely that he was happier now. “Do you think I should make some for her too?”

Hoseok cocked his head. “Will there be enough?”

“As long as it doesn’t burn.” She confirmed, eyeing up the various cartons of purple and scarlet berries in the fridge. “I only have enough fruit and sugar for four at most…”

“Can I help you make it?” Her boyfriend was already hovering closely behind her as she chopped up strawberries and plopped them into the pan. She twisted the hob to a low temperature, handing him a wooden spoon, caressing his hand deliberately as she did so.

“You can stir, if you like.”

Hoseok was attentive as the concoction reduced slowly to a lumpy, burgundy pool, allowing Nana to edge around him to find ribbon and attach labels. Her heart swelled unexpectedly in the comfortable silence between them, wondering what kind of good deed she had committed in her past life to have found him. The past week since his discharge had been a blur of overslept alarms, tangled curls and forgotten suppers. It’d all passed in a frantic haze, and she couldn’t help but appreciate the simple happiness she felt now in just knowing he was close by.

Tenderly, she snaked her arms around him, resting her cheek into the crook of his neck as he stirred. His cologne reminded her of lemongrass and potted herbs after the rain, his body slender and long to match her own. He shifted against her, his lips tugging into a smile as he reciprocated, pressing his cheek against hers. The absence of his hair tickling her skin still felt strange.

“I really missed having you around, Hoseok.” Nana whispered quietly, her voice tinged with emotion. He gently entwined his fingers around her own with his free hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

“It was really hard…” he admitted, and she knew that he too was thinking about how much he had missed her. Their moments of bliss when he was able to visit had always seemed far too brief. Already short, they had been cut even shorter by her commitments at work, leaving a sunken, aching feeling in her chest whenever he had to leave.

“I realised how much I love you. “ She continued. “And that I want to be with you for as long as I can.”

His eyes found hers, and she wasn’t surprised to see them wet at the corners. “Me too, Nana.”

They both turned into each other, their lips coming together. He sank into her touch as she ran a hand to his shoulder and lovingly brushed the prickly patch of hair behind his ear. His breath was warm and inviting, their kiss unbroken as both hands grasped desperately at her waist. The forgotten jam bubbled slowly, and Nana felt for the knob on the stove, awkwardly twisting it as the sickly sweet smell of it boiled up.

“Oh, shit..” Hoseok whispered, remembering the saucepan as he pulled back slightly, giving it a token stir once more.

She grinned, her face hot as she moved it to the back burner. “I think it’s done, anyway.”

“Phew.” He exhaled in obvious relief. He pulled her close once again, their hips pressed together, and she could feel that he was already hard beneath his sweatpants.

“Hoseok...” Nana breathed. “Take me to bed.”

***

Thank you for reading. To read each member & their girlfriend’s headcanon universe fics in order, follow the links here: RM / Jin / Suga / J-Hope / Jimin / V / Jungkook

& Our full masterlist can be found here

You can support us by buying admins a coffee here (if you wish). :)

16 notes · View notes