Yuzu: the citrus fruit that looks like it fell off a lorry
Pity the food world. Constantly on the hunt for the next avocado, but never coming close. Yuzu is definitely not the next avocado. Still, it is giving it the college try in that it too is a culinary weathervane with a quirky history, one that tastes nice once you have got your head around it and is absolutely everywhere once you start looking for it.
The bare bones: yuzu is a fruit that originated in China, now tends to be grown in Japan and in its raw state is pretty ugly. It looks a bit like a lime that fell off a lorry and in fact tastes a bit like that, too – a sort of sharp hybrid of lime, lemon and grapefruit. It’s not exactly subtle, but juiced and mixed with other things, it certainly has the audacity to go mainstream.
I first came across it in Nigel Slater’s 2013 book, Eat: The Little Book of Fast Food, with a sidenote saying it was available in specialist Japanese supermarkets; five years later, it comes in four incarnations at Waitrose and as a seasoning at both Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
Nobu (the fancy restaurant with all fish and no carbs), celebs and several outposts have been doing magical things with yuzu for ages. It is the (no longer) secret ingredient of Nobu’s footballer’s-wife classic, miso-marinated black cod, and now the restaurant has turned it into a one-bite tart as part of its affordable-for-Nobu festive afternoon tea (£30 with a glass of wine). It’s not the first place you think of come Christmas, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to do afternoon tea.
The tart is a resounding success, the yuzu custard all zingy and bouncy, and barely set in its case, overshadowing the rest of what is a great tea party, served on china with black tea and snow crab tempura sandwiches. The whole shebang is joyous – each macaroon and cake is shaped into something seasonal such as a tree or a reindeer, which clash comically with the otherwise serious interiors of the restaurant.
If you want the full yuzu experience, my advice is to treat it like you would a lemon/lime/grapefruit and eat it in something sweet, ideally somewhere Japanese. I tried almost everything yuzu-based I could for the purposes of this column. If you can track it down, Sansu’s yuzu and salty lychee drink manages to not be disgusting, while a small bottle of yuzu juice from Waitrose peps up a green-salad dressing. Despite some heavy Googling, yuzu peel, an Asian staple, eluded me. This is a shame – one of its main uses is added to a bath as a relaxant, presumably for when you have overdone the yuzu.
