Or any fruit, I think, for that matter.
This is a written version of me trying out 쿠킹하루 Cooking Haru’s Tangerines video, which you can watch here:
The ingredient list is simple:
- Peeled and deseeded tangerines/mandarin oranges, enough for 240ml of juice
- 10g of butter, we used salted butter
- 40g of cornstarch OR 80gm of tapioca starch
- 100g of sugar (rough white sugar will do)
- Extra sugar for dusting
- (Optional) Zest of a tangerine/mandarin orange
- (Optional) Salt to taste
Steps
- Juice your fruits and then strain through a fine mesh filter. Compost or throw away the pulp (you can probably use them for a different recipe but we composted ours).
- In a pan, zest approximately 1 tablespoon’s worth of fruit skin. If you don’t have it, you can skip this step.
- Add your starch and sugar to the pan. Then add your juice. Mix everything well.
- When everything is mixed, then you can turn on the fire on your stove or induction cooker. Use LOW HEAT.
- Stir the mixture and let come to a soft boil aka you see it starting to bubble here and there – you may need to wait a bit.
- Keep stirring. Lumps will begin to form and the liquid will begin to evaporate quickly, yes, even on low heat. The smell might be amazing.
- Stir continuously until the mixture resembles something like a jam aka you see no runny liquid. Add your butter now. If you are using salted butter, you can probably skip adding additional salt.
- Continue stirring over low heat, incorporating the butter. As you do so, you’ll notice it should start to decrease in size even more.
- When the mixture no longer sticks to your spatula, it should be ready.
- Prepare a container by putting cling wrap over it. The cling wrap will keep the dessert from sticking on the sides of the container and make removal easy, so make sure you measure enough to cover all sides.
- Transfer dessert to your cling wrap-covered container. Press the dessert into the container so it will fit the container nicely. Cover with the overhanging cling wrap.
- Chill in the fridge for a few hours. Video says 1-2 hours but you can go longer.
- Remove from container and cut into small, bite-sized pieces.
- In a non-white plate, add enough sugar to layer the bottom. Then transfer a few pieces at a time to this plate, rolling them to coat them with sugar.
- Plate and eat! I hope you enjoy this!
Here’s our unpretty yet delicious plate:
Tips
- The zest is optional. I think it adds more colour and potential texture in the final dish, but we had no unpeeled fruits so we skipped this step
- We did not need to add any salt as we were using salted butter. I don’t know if margarine would do as a substitute but I suspect it wouldn’t be as good
- Use a non-metal cooking implement after adding butter. We found the mixture did not cling as much to the silicone spatula as it did with the wooden spatula
- Depending on your fruits, you may not be able to skip the dusting step. We found this step gave the dessert a more rounded profile, bringing out the flavours of the orange
- The only reason I suggest using a non-white plate is so you can see where the sugar is