Seville Orange Marmalade Tart
Under the tutelage in Los Angeles of Nancy Silverton, chef and owner/creator of Mozza as well as the La Brea Bakery (and the now-shuttered Campanile), I learned and honed many of the principles that I now have regarding food. While working with her, every Wednesday I would return from the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market and head into the kitchen with cases of fruit to bake with for our pastry menu.
One day, in the middle of a typical mild California winter, I arrived back at the bakery with a case of Oro Blanco’s, a citrus which is gold-yellow to chartreuse in color and has a shiny skin and a thick, pithy peel nearly an inch thick. It is refreshing, sweet and bitter. I had plans of sectioning the fruit to bake into a frangipane tart and candying the pith to rid it of its bitter flavor and garnish the plate with it, but Nancy had other ideas. “Juice the fruit and keep the peels,” she said, “and meet me in the ice cream room with the Robot Coupe (an industrial food processor)”. Once there, she poured the juice into a bowl and stirred in sugar and a glug of invert syrup to create a sorbet base, then she threw the peels into the processor. She pulsed the peels into a rough chop, and stirred them along with a portion of the sorbet base into a beautiful vintage Italian ice cream machine, one of only two in the city of L.A. Stumped as to why she would add something so wild and bitter to an otherwise fragrant sweet fruit base, I spooned a portion of the sorbet into my mouth, only to realize it was as if I was eating the very fruit itself, unadorned, with nothing to mask its bitterness, rather capturing and celebrating the truly unique characteristics of this fruit.
This was an “aha moment” for me, and a valuable lesson that still I hold as my guiding principle while baking. I am here simply to allow ingredients to showcase their very essence, and to brighten and highlight their truest forms of self-expression without hiding or diminishing their qualities - even the ones that may be frowned upon.
Fast forward many years to Bakeshop. Last year, as Covid brought our business to a virtual halt, we were a team of bakers able to finish our daily work with an hour or so at the end of our shift left to “play.” Seville Orange Marmalade had long been on my list to tackle, and we received a supply of the oranges. The fruit itself requires a lot of work to prep, with the jamming process covering a few days. One day after our lamination work was finished, I decided to tackle it. We cut and sliced our way through a case of this oddball fruit, a bitter citrus with a gnarled and bumpy skin, and spongy flesh containing an abundance of seeds -- not one that you would eat out of hand, but one meant for cooking. When properly cooked into a marmalade, its ethereal fragrance and candied skin suspend in the most glorious gel of orange lollipop flavor.
An amateur mistake in preparing this marmalade is to add more sugar than needed to mask the Seville’s bitter flavor, but having carried Nancy’s lesson with me throughout the years, I knew to maintain a reserved hand, adding just enough sugar to set the marmalade, but not enough to cover up the inherent bitterness of the fruit. Into the freezer it went, along with many of our products, waiting out the long days, weeks and months of the pandemic until we could be a fulltime bakery again and create something with it.
As Seville season is now upon us once again, for this week’s Secret Item I have decided to make Seville Orange Marmalade Tarts, using this beautiful marmalade, spread over frangipane and a corn flour crust, topped with an arrangement of fresh blood oranges and Meyer lemons, then baked until bubbling and caramelized. This is a pastry that reminds me of where we have been, and that we are still here, moving forward, inspired by the world around us. A bite of sunshine on these cloudy, rainy and moody days, like life itself, acknowledging the bitter to fully appreciate the sweetness. Available this week for our newsletter subscribers only, so be sure to join our email list for access to all of our weekly specials.
With love,