Yuzu Euphoria

I have been a passive Sugar High Friday watcher up until now. Then this month, when the brilliant Helen of Tartelette, one of my all-time favorite food bloggers, announced that she would be hosting this month’s edition and that the theme was citrus, I knew that it was time to get into the kitchen and actually participate this month. I knew right away what type of citrus I wanted to highlight, and then finally got my inspiration on how to use it just a few days ago.

Living in Japan I have fallen in love with yuzu, a type of citrus found in Asia.

The smell of yuzu is intoxicating, a mixture of orange blossoms and lemon. Then, once cut into, the flesh of the fruit smells like it tastes, an extremely tart flavor that has hints of grapefruit, lemon, and mandarin orange all wrapped up in one. This fruit is used in a variety of ways in Japanese cooking. In fact there is quite a bit of evidence of those uses in my own refrigerator.

Yuzu koshou, a spicy paste made from yuzu zest, chile and salt and used as a condiment.

Dried yuzu zest.

Ponzu shoyu, a sauce whose main ingredients are citrus juice (yuzu juice is often used) and soy sauce.

Yuzu juice (unsweetened).

So I had my citrus all picked out, now I just needed a recipe. My inspiration finally came when that same genius Helen posted a recipe for lemon madeleines. I quickly got to work, and the result was the perfect blend of 2 of my biggest sources of inspiration: Japan and France.

Yuzu is quite strong, so the madeleines were wonderfully tangy. The only modifications I made were to replace lemon zest and lemon juice with yuzu zest and yuzu juice. Perfect. Perfect enough to have my own magical Proust-worthy moment.

“I” is definitely for Inspiration.

“She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?”

–Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann’s Way. English translation, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. London: Chatto and Windus, 1922. Excerpt retrieved online from Project Gutenberg e-Book of Volume 1.