A sunny citrus salad recipe with juicy blood orange and grapefruit segments and finely sliced fennel. All drizzled with tart, fruity pomegranate molasses and topped with sweet/sour candied citrus peel.
This salad is an absolute taste sensation, a gorgeous marriage of sweet and sour. The pomegranate molasses really brings the whole thing together.
The candied citrus peel (I used pomelo) is coated in a mix of sugar and citric acid, a bit like delicious sour jelly sweets. I get my citric acid from the spice section of my local international food store. Great for cocktails too ?
A fruity, sweet/sour taste sensation.
Citrus salad with fennel and pomegranate
A sunny citrus salad recipe with juicy blood orange and grapefruit segments and finely sliced fennel. All drizzled with tart, fruity pomegranate molasses and topped off with sweet/sour candied pomelo peel.
Servings: 4
Ingredients
sour candied citrus peel
- 1/2 pomelo, 1 grapefruit, 1 orange, 2 lemons or 2 limes
- 200g + 3 heaped tbsp golden caster sugar
- 3 heaped tsp citric acid
citrus salad with fennel and pomegranate
- 1 small or 1/2 large fennel bulb
- 2 pink grapefruits
- 1 blood orange
- 4 tbsp pomegranate molasses
- sour candied citrus peel
- edible gold (optional)
Instructions
for the citrus peel
- Wash the fruit and dry well. Using a vegetable peeler, cut lengths of peel from the fruit, avoiding as much of the bitter white pith as possible. Scrape off any pith still on the peel with a small spoon. Cut each piece of peel into 2-3mm strips.
- Put 200g sugar in a medium saucepan and add 200ml water. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 5 minutes, until lightly thickened. Add the strips of peel, reduce the heat to low and simmer for 10-15 minutes, until the peel turns translucent.
- Using a slotted spoon, transfer the peel pieces to a sieve and drain well. Put the remaining 3 heaped tbsp sugar and the citric acid into a plastic ziplock bag and shake to combine. Add the drained peel and shake to evenly combine.
- Transfer the coated peel to a piece of baking paper, arrange in an even layer and leave to dry (a few hours).for the salad
- Juice one of the pink grapefruit and add the juice to a medium bowl. Slice the fennel as thinly as possible (a mandoline is great for this) and add to the juice. Marinate the fennel in the grapefruit juice for a few hours, up to overnight.
- Segment the remaining pink grapefruit and blood orange, discarding all the pith (see this tutorial on How to segment citrus if needed).
- Either arrange all the salad components on a large platter for people to share or assemble the salads individually with a small heap of marinated fennel, 2 grapefruit segments and 2 blood orange segments on each plate.
- Drizzle everything with the pomegranate molasses, sprinkle with a little flaky sea salt and top with the candied citrus peel. Gold dust optional!
