When life gives you sour oranges, you make candied orange peel, marinade, pie, decorations, body scrubs, cocktails, tea, and of course “lemonade”.

Every December I end up with too many sour oranges to know what to do with. I have two established sour orange trees in my yard. They were here when we bought the house and ever since moving in, I’ve tried to find new ways to use the bucket loads we end up with at the end of every year.

I’m no stranger to sour oranges. I grew up on a few acres of land that was an orange grove in its former life. There were a few leftover orange trees scattered throughout the property and most of the scattered trees had sour oranges.

I learned that the original grove was full of sweet, naval oranges that were grafted on to sour orange tree root systems. Apparently the root systems of sour oranges are much more resilient than the sweet ones. Go figure. So the sour orange trees grew up from the roots whenever the sweet orange trees died.

This year I decided to make candied orange peel.

It was easy, delicious and a wonderful change of pace to the traditional Christmas treats we usually pass out to our neighbors every year.

And because it’s Christmas time, I had to make some chocolate covered peels as well. The flavor combination of chocolate and orange always makes me think of those super yummy chocolate oranges you smash on the table in order to open. I always loved those as a kid and this year I got three of them in my stocking! So the chocolate covered peels is where it’s at for me!

These are so incredibly good! I used dark chocolate because… duh… and so they’re almost healthy, ya know? But seriously, as far as Christmas treats go, these are doing pretty good on the healthy yet delicious scale. Im pretty obsessed. And they came from my trees! We’re checking off all kinds of things:

Super Cheap
Very Easy
Totally Unique
Nostalgic Flavors
Sort of Healthyish
From My Yard

I feel like I’m winning here.

As you’ll see in the video at the bottom of this post, I also used every single other part of the orange for something. I saved the seeds in case any of my friends want to grow their own lovely tree. **Message me or leave a comment if you’re interested!** I saved the juice for marinades, cocktails, sour orange pie and “lemonade”. I dried a couple of slices off of each orange to use as decoration for garnishing said cocktails or jars of orange peel. They make such a beautiful addition to any sort of homemade gift or Christmas treat. I used the water from blanching my orange peels to water my garden plants (though you could even use it as tea, and get loads of vitamin C), and I used the simple syrup reduction from candying the peels for cocktails as well. And lastly, I composted the leftover flesh of the oranges. Bam. Zero waste. Still winning.

So let’s get to it then, shall we?

1. I started by peeling my oranges. I made sure just to peel the top layer of skin with a vegetable peeler. This allowed me to get the beautiful zesty orange layer that has all of the fragrant oils in it. I did my best not to get any of the thick white pith underneath. The pith is quite bitter. Also, anytime you say the word pith out loud it just makes you second guess if that’s the right word or not.

For the compost 👆🏼

For me 👇🏼

2. The next thing I did was bring a pot of water to a boil on my stove.

3. I prepared a separate bowl with some ice water so that I could blanch my peels.

4. I boiled the peels for about 30 seconds and then transferred them to the cold water to stop the cooking. You could repeat this blanching process one or two more times if you prefer sweeter peels. The blanching process helps to remove any bitterness from the pith.

I made one batch and blanched it once, and then another batch and blanched it twice. I actually enjoyed the first batch more because the hint of bitterness made me keep going back for more candied peels. The first bite of candied peel is super sweet and then it ends with a slightly bitter after taste and it just had me so hooked.

I also prefer fewer steps between me preparing my food and me eating my food so the single blanch was the winner for me.

5. After blanching I brought a pot of simple syrup to a boil. So equal parts water to sugar. I did a cup of each and it was enough to cover my batch of peels. My batch was about 6-8 oranges.

6. I boiled my peels in the sugar water for about 20 minutes, until they started to look a little translucent.

7. My peels were done with their wet sugar bath and ready for their dry sugar bath. I dropped them in a tray of granulated sugar. I spread them out and coated them with the sugar granules until they weren’t sticky anymore.

8. Next, I transferred them to a cooling rack so they could harden up a bit.

It only took a few minutes. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes until they were ready to eat or store in an airtight container or dip in chocolate!

This is where it’s really at right here.

9. If you want to add chocolate to your peels—and trust me, you do—then start melting your chocolate of choice using the double boiler method. I used about a cup of dark chocolate, chocolate chips.

10. When the chocolate melted, I dipped about half of each peel into the chocolate and the. Set the peels on a tray with aluminum foil to harden.

I learned in my research that placing your aluminum foil shiny side down would give you more of a nonstick surface than if you were to place the peels on the shiny side. I never knew that one side was more nonstick than the other. Just thought I’d pass that along incase you didn’t know that either.

11. Pop those bad boys in the freezer for 10 minutes or so and you’re good to go! You can store them in a lovely old salsa jar like I did, in a Tupperware container, a ziplock bag or just eat them.

These turned out so nicely and they were super easy to make. I love the texture, the look, the flavors. It’s all very a-peeling if you know what I mean…

This has become my favorite way to utilize my sour oranges but you can certainly make these candied peels using any sort of citrus you want.

I hope you get a chance to try these! Check out my video tutorial if that a-peels to you. Ok, I’m done!