Hello, and welcome to Saber Protection of iHeartRadio.
I'm any Rey and I'm Lauren vocal Bam, and today we have an episode for you about orange blossom water.
Yes, and what a tangled wave webb it weaves.
Oh my goodness, I have never been so mad at an outline that I am simultaneously so delighted by.
Yes. Yeah, well with that teaser. Is there any particular reason this was on your mind?
Bloord, You know there there was, but it could have been anything at this juncture. I think maybe like we had mentioned it in passing in something else, or maybe it was just on my list for a long time, because when we did rose Water, I was like, oh yeah, and add that one to the list. At any rate, here we are.
Here, we are here, we are for past episodes that might be relevant. You can see our orange episode.
And Sweet Oranges.
Uh huh.
We've got a couple other orange and citrus episodes in their shirt.
Yes, also rose Water.
Right, also Orgatt Pando Mortos, our New Orleans cocktail culture episode regarding specifically the Ramos Gin Fizz. There's a bunch of others, like Turkish Delight, maybe Pavlova I can't remember all of the things that this one touches on, and as we frequently say, we have no idea what we've done in the past or possibly what we're doing right now.
That's just how we roll.
Vaguely related. You can bop over to Stuff to Blow Your Mind the podcast for our guest episode with Joe covering Ambergris for another interesting food flavoring.
Indeed, uh huh uh.
Currasow is vaguely related due to the type of orange that we're going to be talking about. That that's why, that's why it was specifically on my mind because we just talked about carosow.
Here we are, there, we go, Okay, we've got to the bottom of that mystery. Well, speaking of Still to Blow your Mind, we were fortunate enough to get to guests on that show. Depending on when you listen to this, it's coming out next week or maybe it's already out. But it's about interesting things that can happen to food when they're stored in containers, and it is very interesting. As boring as that might sound.
Yeah, yes, we talk about lasagna batteries and how many of them it would take to power a significant amount of stuff.
So yes, and if you have the answer to that, we actually didn't arrive at that.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. How many Lasagnas would it take to power in nation through their electrical capacity?
You'll have to see any episode for more on. We're just gonna leave it in mystery, but we won't leave you in mystery about this, right, Yes, as much as we can. Yeah, that's to our best capacity exactly, which brings us to our question. Orange blossom water.
What is it?
Well?
Orange blossom water is a type of liquid flavoring and or scent that's made by processing the flowers of bitter oranges. Basically, you steam to still out like the fun flavorful oil, and then separate the oils from the water that you've added. The remaining water is still chock full of lovely things. It smells sweet and tastes bitter, with citrusy, green, fruity,
and kind of powdery floral flavors. It's clear to very pale gold and color, and is used mostly in sweet dishes and drinks like pastries and sweetbreads and cakes, or to make dowsing syrups for things like bucklava, or in creamy puddings and frozen desserts or in citrusy cocktails, but it can compliment savory dishes too. I think that in cuisines that favor vanilla, it is so orange blossom water that is so old fashioned that it's new again. But there are a lot of cuisines that it never left,
where it inspires a lot of fondness and nostalgia. It's like it's like putting your face in a citrus tree in full bloom, just like heady and warm and enveloping and a little bit invigorating. It's like a It's like the feeling that you get when you realize you have a crush on someone.
Yeah. It's a really bright, happy and in some cases overwhelming.
Yeah yeah, leaves you a little bit breathless. So these specific orange blossoms in question are those of the Seville orange or the bitter orange or sour orange, botanical name Citrus oorentium. The fruit itself is too bitter and sour to eat out of hand, just like a real punch in the face, but the juice and the peel can be used in sweet and savory dishes and drinks. They're
the signature citrus for English style marmalade. The blossoms, which bloom in clusters of small, white, fragrant flowers, have some of those same bitter and citrusy flavors along with right, like a little bit of green and this sort of fruity grapey twinge, some real pretty florals, and then that signature sweet scent. And by the way, if you never have put your face near living citrus blossoms, I cannot
recommend it enough. It is so nice noted. Yeah, yeah, come over, I've got a lime tree for orange blossom water. The flowers are usually picked by hand in the hours immediately following sunrise, before the heat of the day has the chance to like dry the flowers out, and then they are processed asap, just right away if you can. The petals of orange blossoms contain a number of volatile essential oils that is naturally occurring plant based, smelly oily stuff.
The oil that you get from bitter orange blossoms is called neuroli. It's relatively expensive because it takes like a lot of flowers to get a little oil, though the resulting oil is pretty strong and is used mostly in perfumery and other cosmetics. You might have heard of neurally oil. But to get neurally oil out of orange blossoms, especially
on a commercial scale, you gotta distill them out. So, Okay, everything has a boiling point, right, a point at which whatever liquid stuff will vaporize, and that boiling point differs slightly for pretty much everything. And you can use this science fact to separate out all kinds of interesting things from their original homes just by boiling them in water.
So you can get the ethanol out of a grain and fruit mash and concentrate it into liquor, or you can get the flavors out of juniper and citrus, peel and annis, etc. Out of all of those botanicals in order to flavor gin. Distillation is heating stuff in or with water to the boiling point of whatever you're interested in, and then collecting the vapors and cooling them back into a liquid. When you do this with orange blossoms, you
get a mixture of water and neuroli. Because oils and waters don't like each other very much, the oils will separate out and can be pretty easily filtered or redistilled, leaving you with a colorless water that still contains an impressively strong punch of orange blossominess. If the product has a golden tint to it, it's not because the color came through in the distillation. It's because it's been exposed to sunlight at some point. The color comes from chemical
reactions among the compounds in the blossom water. If you happen to have access to bitter orange trees, you can make this at home. Check the internet for recipes. You can try other types of citrus flowers, obviously they won't have exactly the same flavors. You can also find orange blossom water for sale and markets, especially ones with like a good Middle Eastern import section, or sometimes alongside cocktail flavorings or coffee flavorings, or maybe in the bake section.
And yeah, it plays really well with like warm and or bitter flavors, things like chocolate, nuts, especially almonds, warm spices.
You can also use it.
To play off of like fruity or fresh flavors, like in dressings for fruit salads or vegetable salads. It's lovely and cold drinks like lemonade or fruity punches, or just sparkling or still water. It's also nice in hot drinks like tea or coffee. Or even just hot water. It can also help cut or like add complexity to rich flavors like it goes well with the sweetened cheese pastries, or like a cheesecake or a rice pudding, or even in savory dishes like meat pies. A lot of Middle
Eastern desserts call for couture. I think I'm not rolling my r NF, but I think I've got that nearly correct. It's a flavored syrup made with sugar, water, lemon juice, and a touch of orange blossom.
And or rose.
It can be used as an ingredient in stuff or as a drizzle, dip or soak. And like rose water, I will say that if you're using if you're going to try using orange blossom water for the first time at home, start with less than maybe you think that you're gonna need like a quarter teaspoon, just a couple of drops. It can be real potent, especially if you're not used to it. And the line between like ooh that's fun and like oh, that's soap is just easy to trip over. The orange blossom water is a bit
more gentle and less grandma than rose water. And side note, there has to be some like classic perfume that makes Americans connect rose to Grandma's. Or maybe it's that rose was phased out of American cooking but not out of American cosmetics, so things like lipstick and face powder were still scented with it through certainly the middle of the nineteen hundreds. I'll have to look into it when I get a chance, or y'all write in if you know more about perfumery than I do.
Yes, please, Yeah, Yeah.
Orange blossom water is also used in cosmetics and in folk and or traditional medicines, and I understand that in Morocco it's a symbol of hospitality. You might like sprinkle it on a guest's hands when you're welcoming them into your home, or as part of religious ceremonies or stuff like that.
Yes, and as always, listeners, please write in about that as well. Well. What about the nutrition.
It has been said to have various medicinal properties for a really long time. Generally you're not you're not usually consuming enough of it for it to make much of a nutritive difference. But yeah, like I said, it's been in traditional medicines for a very long time, and various it and its components are being instigated for different potentially cool properties. But yeah, saber motto, saber motto. Indeed, Well, we have a couple numbers for you, just a couple.
Uh So, I couldn't track down like industrial numbers about how much of this stuff is produced, but I will say that some thousand pounds of flowers go into making just one pound of neuuri oil. How much orange blossom water that creates, I don't know. I couldn't find that out. There are a few orange blossom, like bitter orange blossom festivals around the world in places where they have been traditionally grown. One of them in Marrakesh in Morocco every
spring is called the Zaia Festival. Oh, I didn't look it up, and I'm having regrets, but we're just going to keep on going right now. That was in its thirteenth year in twenty twenty five, and it's based on like home distillation traditions and springtime celebrations and went public thirteen years ago to encourage I mean, you know, commerce and education, as most festivals do. I read that the organizing association is applying to get the area's orange blossom traditions recognized by UNESCO.
So that's pretty cool. That is cool. Another thing you listeners will have to write in about if you have attended or no more.
Oh yeah, yeah right, and I read about similar things in Crete and in Italy, so write let us know.
But now we must peel open a bit of a difficult history.
Yeah, yep, uh yeah, we're going to do that, but first we are going to take a quick break for word from our sponsors, and we're back.
Thank you sponsors, Yes, thank you. So oranges a whole different episode, one that we've already done but could probably revisit with specific varieties.
Yeah. Yeah, the various bitter orange varieties are super interesting, and various sweet varieties are super interesting. They're all pretty cool, yes.
And have many applications throughout history doing this one.
And sometimes people just don't specify whether they were talking about sweet versus bitter oranges in the historical literature, which is really fun.
It is fun and gave me a great headache and a deletion a lot of stuff. I'd already put it in the outline, but we'll talk about that a little bit more later. Seville oranges the orange often in question when it comes to the early history of orange blossom water likely originated in Asia through trade routes. They traveled to the Middle East and North Africa, and then up to Europe in the eighth or ninth century CE, perhaps through invaders from North Africa. Sweet oranges arrived in Europe
through a similar path, but much later centuries later. Yeah. These types of distilled waters have a long history of use in the Middle East as an aroma or as a flavoring for desserts beverages, these types being obviously orange blossomed water distillation has been around for thousands of years, but Arab scholars were some of the first to refine the method. Around the eighth century CE, the techniques made their way to Europe, where over the centuries they were refined even further.
Yep and distilled waters might have originated as like a byproduct of the concentrated oils that people were after, but they pretty quickly became embedded in the cultures of the peoples who produced them as valuable unto themselves.
The cultivation of bitter oranges in Europe particularly took off in the Mediterranean. People in Sicily were growing bitter oranges by the eleventh century or earlier, and they were using orange blossom water as early as the fourteenth century.
Arabs brought better oranges to southern Spain and were cultivating them there around the same time, like the eleventh century or so, and specifically around the city of Seville, where the trees lined the streets. To this day, the oranges became associated with the city and the wider province, to the point that they eventually took on the name Saville oranges.
In the early days in Europe, orange blossom water was primarily used for things like perfumes or prescribed Medicinally. It was used culinarily, but less so. Orange blossom water was less available and more expensive to produce than rose water at the time, so Europeans typically used rose water over orange blossom water when cooking.
And this kind of just makes sense, like you could grow roses more successfully in a lot more places then you can grow orange trees. Though in several places like Crete and Marrakesh, orange blossom water distillation became a practice handed down specifically from mother to daughter.
When the Spanish, Italians, and Portuguese started colonizing parts of the Americas in the fourteen hundreds fifteen hundreds, they brought bitter oranges with them. They planted them where they thought they would grow, and they particularly took off in Florida after the Spanish planted them there in the sixteenth century.
Yeah, Spanish colonization of Mexico is how orange blossomed water eventually wound up in Pentamorphos.
People in France were growing Seville oranges by the sixteenth century, specifically to produce orange flower water or use as a fragrance and flavoring agent. Yeah.
They were mostly, perhaps entirely grown in the south and made it over into the Ligurian area of Italy like the coastal northwest around the same time, and those old orange blossom products that the Neurolean the flower water became like a major part of the economy there.
Yes, and a century later this ingredient was more widespread across Europe's culinary landscapes, so people were really accepting this orange blossom water. The orange trees, though, didn't grow well during European winters, so growers built greenhouses specifically for citrus during the Renaissance period. This also allowed for cultivating of the oranges further north. We've talked about this in past citrus episodes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. But yeah. So. By the sixteen hundreds, orange flower water was a very posh flavoring around Europe, partially because it was so expensive, so like feasts might have featured a dessert course accompanied by a small fountain of orange flower water, not even for consuming, just like for the scent. It remained a popular ingredient in cosmetics and fragrances too, based on these perceived health properties, and sometimes because it was considered say it with me and.
Yeah, yeah, it's been so long. Yeah.
Using it in drinks and both sweet and savory dishes was something of a status symbol in England and France around the seventeen hundreds. I read in a couple of places that France's madelines that like small scallop shaped cake herb scallop shell shaped cake, that they originally were flavored with orange flower water, though I don't think that came up at our Madeline episode reading, because we didn't mention it. In that episode. We mentioned citrus zest, but not orange
flower water. Supposedly, Marie Antoinette was a fan of orange blossom water baths. By the early eighteen hundreds, it was becoming slightly less expensive, especially diluted versions partially, you know, thanks to the crimes against humanity that had been committed by Europeans and the Caribbean, you know, all the genocide and enslavement really opened up production in trade. Sorry, I'm really mad about like a lot of stuff right now,
and it's leaking through via harsh but accurate language. Anyway, Chefs in England and France and Italy and beyond used orange flower water for event menus around that time. It would go into things like lamb and poultry dishes, dressings for savory salads and fruit salads, all kinds of desserts, from cookies to custards, to jellies, to ices and ice creams.
It was often paired with almonds, and it was added to or jotte, which is a sweetened almond syrup which was used to make chilled drinks or to mulled wine. It also wound up as an ingredient in Spain's version
of the Kingcake. And general note about all of this, like, remember that vanilla was extremely expensive and only existed in small quantities until like the middle to late eighteen hundreds, you know, because it's the seed pod of a tropical orchid that only opens for potential pollination one single morning
of its life, not making it easy on anybody. So like until this enslaved twelve year old figured out how to hand pollinate orchids, the vanilla orchids, vanilla was pricey, so up through then things like rosewater and orange blossom water were the go to flavorings for sweets that certainly
Americans would modernly use vanilla. And I know not everyone as excited about vanilla as we are, but by the late eighteen hundreds at least orange blossom water was being used in like posh cocktail cities like New Orleans as an ingredient in things like the Ramus Gin Fizz, which is this gin cocktail with lemon and lime juice, little orange blossom water, heavy cream, sugar, and an egg white, shaken and bad and shaken until it is extremely frothy.
It is rumored to have been invented in the eighteen eighties. So also, Queen Margarita, whom Margherita Pizza is supposedly named for, was a fan of both dorolei and orange flower water, and apparently her pastry chefs made this dish of lady fingers with orange blossom water that they called the Queen's biscuits.
The Queen's biscuit. Okay, all right, Well, now we're entering into our promised a stage of confusion around sweet and bitter oranges. But I think we've got it. I think so, I think so. An American botanist by the name of William Bartum wrote that oranges were flourishing in some parts of Florida in seventeen seventy four, and he went out
of his way to mention how fragrant they smelled. By the eighteen hundreds, oranges were growing in Georgia and South Carolina, but an eighteen thirty five freeze and then another one that came a few decades later pretty much killed them off in those two states.
Yeah and yeah, there's a lot of historical confusion about sweet versus bitter oranges, and like when and where they appeared in the Americas and how wide spreadly. I think that most of the oranges in Florida up to the eighteen sixties were bitter ones. But when the orange boom took off there starting in the eighteen seventies, it.
Was because of the.
New success success period of sweet oranges, which however, were usually grafted grown by grafting the branches of sweet oranges onto bitter orange rootstocks.
Yep, so there we are here. Here's some of my remaining notes from my Florida section history. In nineteen oh nine, the sweet orange flower bossom was chosen as Florida's staked flower, and then sometime between nineteen forty nine to nineteen fifty, a man named Harry Yeasel began manufacturing and selling orange
blossom perfume out of Florida, presumably sweet orange. This is fascinating to me because I found all these almost like legends about him, and I tried to get to the bottom of it, and I was like, I can't get any proof, but you can find existence of his products.
Yeah, like you can buy it on the eBay. Yes, so, But there were all these like that was the scent they used to it was some college bowl.
They perfumed it with his perfume. But I couldn't get I couldn't find any evidence of it than people just repeating it like it was a myth. They turned yes story at night. So again, listeners, if you know any more about this, I would love to know. I really tried to get to the bottom of that. H but moving on into more recent years, orange flower water has become more widely available around the globe and a lot more people use it than before. Yeah.
Yeah, and some people really are coming back into it. I think, however, kill joy corner, as this is a natural product. Climate change is worrisome. Over the past few years, farms in places like Morocco have seen droughts that affected crops. On this one particular five hours I was reading about
flower production was down like twenty five percent. Though they did find that the smaller, drier flowers were richer than usual in oil production kind of broke even on oil production, but also the balance of you know, volatile compounds and the oils was different, so it's smelled different than it usually does. So yeah, it's just it's making people shift
and work on the fly, which is a pain. And you know, farming is already a very difficult thing to do, and so yeah, climate change is not helping.
No, no, And so much of this takes so much planning. Anyway, if you lose like a whole crop or something, that's devastating.
Yeah, luckily, I mean, citrus trees are evergreen for the most part. Bitter oranges are evergreen. And so depending on how you treat the trees, you can get a pretty prolonged season for blossoms. Yeah.
Yeah, well on that, I think that's what we have to say about orange blossom water for now.
Yeah. Yeah, we certainly didn't do pages of research about neuroli oil.
There was no deep confusion about the crusades. Surely not.
Yeah, but we would love to hear from y'all if you have a family recipe or a cocktail that you make, or a memory, we would love to hear about it.
Yes we would, But that is what we have to say for now.
We do already have some listener mail for you, though, and we are going to get into that as soon as we get back from one more quick break for a word from our sponsors. And we're back, Thank you sponsoring, Yes, thank you, and.
We're back with listen. Yeah sunny day. Yes. Oh so today we have two let me double check two letters about Tarragon. Oh yay. Love when we can get a theme going. But email is about whatever we like. Oh yeah, all right, So Colleen wrote, loved the episode on Tarragon. I learned a lot, especially the differences between them. Thank you. I know. Now I have French tarragon. It doesn't flower
much and has an annis taste. It is very tough here in eastern Ontario, surviving in a pot on the porch where it gets below negative twenty five degrees celsius by accident at first, but has done it several years in a row. I actually don't like it that much, except with chicken. It doesn't taste like licorice, and is very nice if you add it when you're frying up some chicken or in a pot pie. Heard you like pet pictures. Ruric and Petie are brothers from other mothers.
Thanks for the pot. It lulls me to sleep as I relax and learn. I listen the next day if I missed too much or had to stop because I got too hungry. Oh that's great.
Yes, yes, And included our pictures of the of the surprisingly hardy French tarragon plant. Yes, and the kidders who are cuddled up next to each other. There is a ginger one, a ginger tabby, and a tabby tabby, a brown tabby, and they are their little faces are like making a little heart shape.
The way that they're pressed up next to each other. It's adorable. It's really cute. It's adorable. I'm a little jealous that your cats actually like each other. Orkapedies seem to be, at least in this picture they are getting along.
Yes, yes, I feel like you don't put your face on someone when you sleep if you dislike them.
I mean, it's true unless you are really you like to play with fire otherwise yeah yeah, yeah, so you can let us know calling you if that's the case. Yes, But always appreciated pet photos. And I'm glad you learned about tear ground that I actually learned a lot from that one too. Yeah yeah, I had no idea about the varieties.
Yeah yeah, yeah, no. Putting some in some like pan fried chicken sounds amazing. I've never made a pot pie. And now I'm like, like, Lauren, what are you doing with your life?
You need to fix this immediately apparently.
Yeah, Bart wrote It's been a while since I've written in but when I saw you were doing an episode on Tarragon, I literally squeeed a little, and once you asked for recipes, I just had to write. I love cooking with what I jokingly referred to as opinionated ingredients, and tarragon definitely falls into that category, especially fresh tarragon. I adore the stuff, but sadly it's a real rarity here. One of our supermarkets gets a few bags of fresh
tarragon in a few times a year. I check for it in the shelf each and every week, and when I see it, yoink. My general rule for fresh teragon is that if it has tomato in it, it will work with fresh teragon. So while my pack lasts all substitute it in for basil, time sage or rosemary in anything I'm cooking with tomatoes, and so far, at least
it's always worked out great. I also make sure to intentionally cook a few dishes that simply depend on fresh tarragon to work, my absolute favorites being very much related. One tarragon mashed potatoes finely chop about tablespoon of the fresh leaves per adult portion and mix them in at the very end just before serving. And two tearragon potato salad needs nothing more than cold potatoes, mashed mayo taste, fresh tarragon to taste, and a few grinds of black pepper.
In terms of dried tarragon, again, if it has tomatoes in it, you can't go wrong, but it works especially well in two dishes I cook very regularly. First, my quick and easy tarragon chicken mayo for two and that includes four teaspoons of mayo, two teaspoons of white wine vinegar, a quarter teaspoon of garlic powder, half a teaspoon of dried tarragon, and one hundred grams of finely diced cooked chicken, all mixed into a paste and then spread on some
bread for an amazing lunch in minutes. And second, tomato and tarragon green beans also works great with fresh This one takes a little bit more describing, but is still shockingly simple, so okay for two servings. Start with a little olive and vegetable oil in the bottom of a pan and soften a medium sized red onion for about five minutes. Then add two cloves of minced garlic for another couple minutes or so. Add two hundred grams of topped, tailed and haved fine green beans or very thinly sliced
stringless French beans or runner beans. Splash water, two dice tomatoes, the riper the better, cover and simmer until the tomatoes go to mush and the beans are tender. Uncover and turn up the heat for a few minutes.
At the end.
If there's too much liquid left for your liking, then season with ground black pepper, tarragon, and optionally some parsley and or chives. Then serve. I find with all the umami from the tomato, no salt is needed, and I'm under doctor's orders to cut that right now, but feel free to add a little if desired. Before I started to eat more healthily, I also loved adding a little dried tarragon and garlic powder to my corn flour when
frying chicken breasts. But, like I say, I have to be healthy these days, so I haven't done that in some time.
Well I'm sorry to say. That sounds delicious. That delicious, Yeah, but these other recipes do too.
Oh yeah yeah, and like maybe yeah, I'm like, maybe I haven't been using tarragon correctly, like because I feel like I didn't know about the tomato pairing particularly.
Yeah, I've recently. I don't know how, it's probably the algorithm knows me. But I recently ran into you should be using arragon and tomato as a pairing. So we'll have to look into that.
Oh yeah, yeah, I'll have to see see what's available at my grocery store. You know. Yeah.
I also love your description of Terragon as an opinionated which I think is accurate.
Oh yeah, oh yeah no, And I also love opinionated ingredients. I'm like, no, that's where the flavor is. That's I want more of that, please, thank you?
Yeah no, all of this sounds lovely us and thank you so much for taking the time to send the to us. Thanks to both of these listeners for writing in uh huh. If you would like to write to us, you can our email us hello at saborpod dot com. We're also on social media.
You can find us on Instagram and blue Sky at saber pod, and we do hope to hear from you. Save is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to my heart Radio, you can visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our super producers Dylan Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and we hope that lots more good things are coming your way.