Recipe Description
Grapefruit, love child of an orange/pomelo hookup, flaunts one parent’s sunny nature and the other’s thick-skinned, rotund ways. The hybrid is all sunny bright, easy-peel, sweet and sour cheer. That’s how it rolls.
And yet, I contrived to press grapefruit flat, to square it off into lemon-bar portability.
I squeezed and mixed and baked. Yielding something sweet, soured by a whiff of fruitcake. In another word: bad.
After many yellow squares and many square yellow leftovers, I was visited by a revelation. Fresh grapefruit: good. Cooked grapefruit: bad.
So I reformatted my bars, confining grapefruit to a fresh zest finish. Which worked. The bars sliced up lemon bold, grapefruit fresh, sunshine sweet. Score another for hybrid vigour. – Chicago Tribune/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
Recipe Ingredient
- 3cups sugar
- 3 grapefruits zest, grated
- 2cups flour
- 1pinch salt
- 180g unsalted butter, cut up
- 8 lemons to produce 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice, strained
- 6 eggs
Instructions
- Buzz: Measure sugar into the food processor. Drop in grapefruit zest. Buzz to a fine grapefruit-scented powder, about 1 minute. Scoop ¼ cup scented sugar into a small bowl; set aside. Scoop 2¼ cups scented sugar into a large mixing bowl; set aside.
- Combine: Measure 1½ cups flour and the salt into the remaining ½ cup scented sugar in the food processor. Buzz to combine. Drop in butter. Pulse many times. Mixture will look like fine sand, then coarse sand, then big clumps.
- Pat: Dump clumps into a 13-by-9-inch (33-by-22cm) baking pan. Pat into the bottom of the pan. Slide into a 170°C oven and bake until golden, about 25 minutes.
- Whisk: Meanwhile, whisk remaining ½ cup flour into the scented sugar in the large mixing bowl. Whisk in juice. Whisk in eggs.
- Bake: When pastry is golden, lower oven temperature to 160°C. Pour egg mixture over pastry and bake until center is just set, about 30 minutes. Pull pan out of oven.
- Gild: Spread remaining ¼ cup scented sugar over the top. Cool. Chill. Cut into 48 bars.
