Right now through February, grapefruit are at their sweetest. It wasn’t always that way.
When I was a boy, grapefruit were mostly an old variety called “Duncan,” so seedy they seemed to be half seeds, half flesh. They were always white. They were so acidic you imagined your teeth dissolving. And they were so sour, people sprinkled their cut surfaces with sugar and passed them under the broiler. I didn’t even like grapefruit then.
All that changed in 1979 when the magazine I was working for sent me to interview the late Bern Laxer, who ran a steakhouse in Tampa, Fla. Bern insisted that the salads he served at his restaurant were picked fresh daily and were grown organically. Since this was before the rise of large-scale organic growing, Bern had all his vegetable kitchen waste brought to his property in Tampa where he composted it and fertilized a large truck patch full of salad greens with the compost. So I went to Bern’s house to do an interview.
Bern turned out to be a manic, Type-A ball of energy. Non-stop rapid-fire talking. Hustling, almost running, from house to compost to truck patch back to house. For an example of his approach to things, his restaurant’s wine list was the size of the Holy Bible, chained to a pedestal on each table. He had a room full of pre-phylloxera Bordeaux.
His wine cellar at the restaurant held 500,000 bottles. A warehouse across the street held another 1,000,000 bottles. That was Bern.
As I left, a grapefruit had fallen to the ground from one of his trees. He was in his doorway, shouting goodbyes. “Can I have that grapefruit?” I called. “Sure,” he yelled.
I took the grapefruit to a local park and used my pocketknife to separate the segments. It was white but had no seeds. It was as sweet as candy, with a delicious acid edge. To this day it counts as one of the best foods I’ve ever eaten.
Florida white grapefruit — the variety name is “Marsh” — used to occasionally show up at Raley’s or Sonoma Market here in Sonoma County, but nowadays I never see them.
Almost everything is the lightly colored “Pink Marsh” that’s smaller and not quite as sweet as the white kind, or the brightly colored “Ruby Red” grapefruit from Texas or California. They can be good, but not as good as Florida white grapefruit in January. Still, one can hope Marsh will return some day.
Besides eating it fresh for breakfast, grapefruit is quite versatile in other culinary ways. Marsh is the standard of quality when making grapefruit marmalade, but either pink or red varieties will also do. Segments commonly grace both fruit and green salads.
They pair beautifully with fresh goat cheese. The juice makes the best palate-cleansing sorbet, and bartenders are finding new ways to use it in cocktails, like the Monkey Wrench (1½ ounces white rum, dash of orange bitters, 3 ounces grapefruit juice served in an ice-filled old fashioned glass).
Use grapefruit juice instead of cider vinegar with olive oil, tarragon or sweet basil, a little balsamic vinegar, and a pinch of salt to make a refreshing salad dressing. Grapefruit juice also makes a good marinade for fish or chicken satay.
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