So I got to work investigating and I have to share my newest recipe with you! It is wonderful real orange "candy". Tastes almost like those sweet chewy orange slices to me!
I had to work for about a week to save up enough orange peel for this. Make sure and get organic oranges or you will be eating orange-peel-pesticide strips. So after I bought 1/2 a dozen oranges I got to saving the skins in the refrigerator in a baggy. Every orange we ate, I saved the skin. Even the ones I sent in Journey's lunch, I made her bring the peels home. I am quite sure the poor kid gets all kinds of looks as she brings her "trash" back home in her lunch bag. But it worked and soon enough I had enough orange peels to start my candy.
Take those refrigerated chunks of trash peel and cut them into 1/4 inch strips. It is ok to leave on the white part for this step.. you can remove some of that easier later on.
Throw all your strips of orange peel into cold water (just enough to cover them) and bring it to a boil. Once it is boiling, drain it and start over. Do this boiling process 3 times. That will cut some of the bitterness in the orange peels. After the third boil, dunk them in ice water to stop the cooking process. After the boiling, they are soft and if you want to trim off a bit of that white layer inside of them, it is easy to do at that point but a little time consuming. (I just this minute did a little taste test, eating one that I had trimmed carefully versus one with the white layer intact - the trimmed peel tasted a little better but the untrimmed one was almost as good - so not a critical step here)
In the same pot, add 1 cup of Agave syrup (or another sweetener - I was out of Agave so I put in about 1/2 cup honey, 1/4 cup of rice syrup, and some stevia). Then add about 3 cups of water to that and bring it to a boil. Throw your cold orange peels back in and bring it back to a boil. Simmer in that sweetened water for about an hour (I did not watch my pan well enough and all the water actually simmered away but my oranges didn't burn).
After an hour, put the lid on the pot and leave it on the stove overnight. In the morning, if there is still liquid in the pan with your orange peels, drain it off and lay your sweetened orange peels out on a rack for 24 to 48 hours to dry. While they were still wet, I sprinkled some organic cane sugar over them and added some stevia as well.. just to sweeten them a bit more.
When they are dry, they are really good little bites of sweet orange taste.. very similar to those orange candies at the store. WARNING here: Stevia has a bit of a different taste to it and while it sweetens the food, you might have to adjust to the little bit of aftertaste from the stevia... but heck, if you can drink diet stuff with chemical poison aspartame in it, you can develop a taste for Stevia and save yourself a lot of grief in the long run.
I can't wait to save all my lemon, lime, and grapefruit peels too! What do you know.. healthy candy!!
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