Chinotto ✦

Chinotto

What it is

The story goes that a Ligurian sailor carried the seeds home from China in the sixteenth century, which is where the name comes from. Savona candied the fruit for three centuries until frost and cheap imports finished the trade in the 1920s, and the surviving trees were counted in the hundreds when a Slow Food presidium began replanting in 2004.

In the kitchen

Whole green fruit has to sit weeks in brine before it will take syrup — candy it straight and you waste the sugar, because the bitterness never leaves. One candied chinotto, chopped fine, does more for a panettone than a handful of orange peel.

Goes with

White sugar Dark chocolate Vanilla Almond Honey Yellow gentian root

In season alongside

Lingonberry Bee pollen Calendula Damson Hyssop Jabuticaba

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