Low Sugar Candied Orange Peels

Oranges are one of the most consumed and favorite fruits. Everybody love orange juice, fresh oranges but we always throw away orange peels. But the truth is orange peels are good to your health and eatable. The peels contains high amount of vitamin C, insoluble fiber and many essential minerals. One hundred gram of orange peels can offer you 10.6 gram of fiber, 1,5 gram of protein, 25 gram of carbohydrate. Besides, orange peels consist over 60 flavonoids and 170 different phytonutrients. Researchers found the flavonoids and phytonutrient can retard the growth of cancer cells. And Flavonoid may protect against lung cancer, hesperidin, and help lower cholesterol levels. Since eating entire orange peels may not sound all that appetizing, you can make low sugar candied orange peel. This recipe is easy to make but it consume about 2 to 4 days to finish. Is that too long? Don’t worry, I will show you how to shorten the cooking time one day. In this recipe I reduce the amount of sugar as low as I can and still taste good. 

I am not sure that after all time of cooking the candied orange peels can remain high amount of flavonoid or phytonutrients. But I am sure that candied orange peels are taste good and worth for making it. What do I need to make candied orange peels?

• 500 gr of oranges peel (4 – 5 oranges)
• 200 gr of sugar
• 150 ml honey

Now let’s start to do it.

Step 1: Cut oranges into 4 parts and remove orange peels.  Cut the peel into small pieces length 1 or 1,5 cm and length 5 – 7 cm. If you have special knife to make a zigzag or wave your orange peels will look better.

Step 2: Put all orange peel into cold tap water and boil it. Cook until boiling then reduce the heat and keep it for 5 minutes. You should boil it for 2 or three times to remove the bitter and soften the orange peel. I do step one and two in the morning and they take me 45-60 minutes to finish.

Step 3: After boiling orange peel for twice or three times you keep it into cold tap water. Put 1-2 tsp. of salt depend on the water you put in and keep it for 8 hours. You can make it into the night then in the morning you can start to cook it again. If you don't like to wait 8 hours you can start to cook it right after you boiling and cleaning orange peels. I would prefer to keep it for 8 hours and this step finishes in the evening.

Step 4: Remove oranges peel from cold water with salt and clean it with cold water. Put all oranges peel into a big bowl then put sugar and honey together. Then again keep all ingredients in a cool room for 8 hours. In the evening I do this step and keep it overnight, so that I don't have to wait.

Note: You can skip steps 3, 4 and 5 if you don't have time. At the step 3 you don't keep the orange peels into water for 8 hours and then 8 hours shimmed orange peels in sugar and honey. Instead of that after step 2 you start to cook orange peels. First you put water, sugar and honey in a medium saucepan and bring it to the boil over high heat. Bring the syrup to 238 degrees and add the orange peels.

Step 5: In the morning, I put 300 -400 ml of cold tap water into orange peels and cook until it boiling. Reduce the heat to medium low around 105 – 110, and simmer until the peels are translucent and soft. This step might take you 100 – 120 minutes to dry all the water and soften the oranges peels. You can gently stir the orange peels when cooking it and try not to burn the orange peels in the bottom of saucepan. After this step you can cover your orange peels over sugar to make sugar coat but I did not do it. I want to make low sugar candied orange peels.

Step 6: Dry the orange peels in the clean panel or cooking paper. There are two way to dry the orange peels. Firstly you can keep candied orange peels in dry room for two days or keep it into fridge too. The second one is you can put into oven at 100 – 110 degrees for 10 to 20 minutes. Check it often if you don't want your candied orange peels is too hard. You can add chocolate flavor to the orange peel after dry it. Orange peels and chocolate are good combination.

This recipe takes me 3 days to finish but you also can make it within 1 day too. 

With me I prefer long time recipe because my orange peels are soft and I still can taste the honey in candied orange peels. All the steps of this recipe are easy to make. Here is my candied orange peel, they look quite messy but don’t worry they taste good.

You can eat it along with green tea, or hot drink in winter time or whenever you want. This candied orange peel is good to reduce the cough, keep you warmth or just healthy home-made snack. Let’s try to make this healthy low sugar candied orange peels this weekend. I promise you will not regret when you taste it. Remember to make little more orange peels than you thought. You will eat it faster than you can imagine. Let’s me know what do you think about my recipes, I would love to hearing from you.