Dehydrated Blood Oranges and Kumquats (pics)

This was on radar and forgot about it. I wonder if I can still get these in the store.

Looks great.

How long for just kumquats? I’ve got a tone of them and need to do something.

Friend,

Thank you for sharing those beautiful pictures. At our Prytania home we had a single ancient Japanese plum tree. Some called it a loquat tree. Each March or April it produced an abundance of fruit. I was responsible for harvesting it, a task I took seriously and attacked with full gusto. Often the tree produced 15-20 gallons of loquats.

Mother had been given one of those Ronco electric food dehydrators as a gag gift. It was anything but cheap and I wish it hadn’t broken because dehydrating is a fun and underrated hobby.

Whole loquats never turned out well. We discovered that by peeling and removing the seeds before dehydrating, a beautiful and delicious treat was possible.

We called them loquat candy bites. Each Easter Sunday we handed them out after church. I think some heathens might have attended services just to get free gift bags of the treat.

If anyone knows where I can get a Ronco food dehydrator, please let me know.

Faith, Hope, and Love,
TulaneLSU

They're beautiful.

I'm ignorant so please forgive me... The pealing on the oranges isn't too tough and bitter with the oils being concentrated like that?

Where can you get good orange trees locally?

quote:

---

What's the purpose of dehydrating citrus?

---

I did it to both preserve the harvest and to use them for cocktails. Instead of just using a fresh strip of orange rind to drop in my Old Fashioned, I can now drop a beautiful dried blood orange chip.

Also they eat like a potato chip (yes eat the rind and all), but the sweet orange flavor is super concentrated, so it's like really intense orange candy.

Friend,

Thank you for sharing that wonderful memory.

At their peak, a loquat, to me, tastes better than peak oranges or satsumas. The loquat is native to China and likely arrived in Louisiana with the postbellum Chinese immigrant influx. After Emancipation, Southern plantations still needed labor. While many former enslaved laborers did not see a way out and became sharecroppers, some moved north to the big urban centers. Southern plantation owners looked to Asia for labor.

The Chinese brought many of their foods and customs to the South, especially south Louisiana. Our climate was a perfect match for the loquat. Lou gwat is a closer pronunciation from the Cantonese word. Obviously, the kumquat, or gam-gwat, found a place in the Chinese immigrants' luggage alongside the loquat seeds. The tree is very easy to grow, does not require additional fertilizing, and its fruits are plentiful. The first mention of the Japanese plum in the Times Picayune was 1883. It's odd that it was called Japanese rather than Chinese. New Orleans had less than 500 Japanese citizens that year and many thousands of Chinese citizens. However it came to be know as that, I have heard more people call it Loquat and in the 1950s, the Times Picayune had several recipes for loquat, mostly jellies.

If I can manage a Ronco, I will make a huge batch. Hopefully there will be enough to last until next Christmas when I hope to host an enormous Tigerdroppings Christmas scavenger hunt, carol sing, decoration contest and cookie and hot chocolate party.

The burst of sweetness in a dehydrated peeled and seeded loquat is rarely matched.

Faith, Hope, and Love,
TulaneLSU

Getting close

Yeah, those oranges look amazing. Moro, taracco, or sanguinello? Growing zone? They are not as cold hardy as a Satsuma.