Music and Cats

Most of the time, I try to eat locally. However, at this time of year, I have a craving for a food that does not grow here in the Pacific Northwest, but rather in my home state of Texas. In January, I want grapefruit.

I grew up eating pink grapefruit from the Rio Grande Valley. Despite the “ruby red” name, the grapefruit I remember had paler pink segments than today’s brilliantly red grapefruit. The fruits were smaller and more fragile than the huge, thick-skinned varieties I now find on grocers’ produce aisles. As a child, I did not like sour or bitter flavors, but my mother tricked me into developing a taste for grapefruit. She halved the fruits crosswise, cut the segments loose from their membranes with a small, sharp knife, then topped each juicy hemisphere with a sprinkling of sugar. I liked the grapefruit best when most of the sugar had melted into the juice, but a few crystals remained to provide a sweet crunch. As my tastes matured, I came to love grapefruit without added sugar.

I moved away from Texas for the first time in January of 1980. My first winter in Providence, RI brought many new experiences, some more surprising than others. I expected snow; I was stunned (more than once) by the ice beneath it. I expected a dearth of Mexican food and barbeque; I was distressed by the lack of good grapefruit. Of course, I could find those white Florida grapefruit at any grocer’s, but they were too bitter, with none of the bright fruitiness of Texas pink grapefruit.

When I lamented the lack of grapefruit to my parents, they ordered a box from a Rio Grande farm shipped directly to me. Oh, happy day, when that grapefruit arrived! I peeled the first one like an orange, intoxicated by the scent of grapefruit oil in the air, the sweet-tart lusciousness of the pulp. As soon as I’d licked the last of its juice off my fingers, I began peeling another.

I lived in New England for 4 1/2 years. Each of those years, my parents sent me a box of grapefruit in the dead of winter. When the box arrived, I’d feast on grapefruit (not the same as going on a grapefruit diet!), often eating two or three in one day. When I moved back to Texas to go to grad school, pink grapefruit again became a fact of winter.

By the time I left Texas again, almost 10 years ago, pink grapefruit from south Texas weren’t hard to come by. These days, they’re almost commonplace. At my local grocery store, piles of the blushing orbs keep company with California blood oranges and Florida tangelos. I buy them now as I do other fruit, choosing only enough for a couple of days.

When I read that Sam of Becks & Posh had declared January’s Sugar High Friday to be Sugar Low Friday, the intent being “to make a delicious, mouthwatering dessert whilst being a lot more frugal than usual with the fat and the sugar,” I thought of grapefruit. I’ll happily eat a whole pink grapefruit and call it dessert, but blog about it? I don’t think so. So, what to add to my grapefruit, if not a sprinkling of brown sugar and a quick trip under a broiler? The bottle of late harvest moscato languishing in the our refrigerator seemed a likely coconspirator, and an Epicurious search for “grapefruit + dessert wine” turned up, among the sorbets and compotes, a couple of recipes for grapefruit with sabayon/zabaglione. In the spirit of Sugar Low Friday, I chose the recipe that reduced the fat in the sabayon by using a whole egg rather than two yolks, and I substituted a smaller amount of honey for the recipe’s white sugar. The broiler would come in handy for this recipe, too.

Grapefruit Sabayon Gratin
serves 2-4, depending on their fondness for grapefruit

2 ruby red grapefruit, room temperature
1 large egg
1/4 cup sweet dessert wine (I used Eos ‘Tears of Dew’ muscato)
2 teaspoons honey

Prepare the grapefruit: What you want is grapefruit segments minus all peel and membranes. A recipe will tell you to peel the grapefruit with a sharp knife, removing the skin and all pith, and then cut the segments from their membranes with a sharp knife. I don’t like to lose any of the juice from the grapefruit, so I peel and section the grapefruit, and then de-membrane the segments with my fingers. I love the smell of citrus Layer the segments in two small gratin dishes.

Prepare the sabayon: Beat the egg and honey together in a large metal bowl, then add the wine. Set the bowl over a saucepan of barely simmering water; the bowl should not touch the water. With a handheld mixer (or a whisk, if you’d like to combine exercise with your low-sugar treat), beat at medium-high speed (constantly, if whisking) until the mixture thickens. The time this takes will vary, depending on your definition of barely simmering; my sabayon thickened in about 12 minutes. The sabayon will first foam up, expanding to almost triple its original volume, then reduce again and become smoother as it thickens. Remove the bowl from the heat. (If you are concerned about undercooked eggs, this is probably not the recipe for you. You may, however, use an instant-read thermometer while cooking to verify that the sabayon has reached at least 140 degrees.)

Assemble: Preheat broiler. Place gratin dishes under broiler to warm grapefruit sections, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove dishes from oven; spoon sabayon over segments. Return dishes to broiler just until sabayon is browned, 30 seconds to 1 minute. Serve immediately.

Yum. The combination of warm grapefruit, bursting with tangy juice, and smooth, (not too) sweet wine custard was lovely. Next time, however, I’ll use sugar rather than honey in the sabayon, as the flavor of the blackberry honey that I had on hand was stronger than I’d have liked with the wine. And, while the whole egg made an acceptable sabayon, next time I’ll use two egg yolks, as the additional richness would be an even better foil for the grapefruit.

Update: Go see the beautiful round-up for Sugar High Low Friday #15 at Becks & Posh. Thanks, Sam!

Technorati tags: SHF #15 + Low Sugar

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