UCR Grows Citrus Treasures

05:51 PM PST on Tuesday, November 27, 2007

By OWEN SHEERAN
The Press-Enterprise

On 25 acres off Canyon Crest Drive and Martin Luther King Boulevard in Riverside, near the busy and congested Interstate 215/Highway 60, are more than 2,000 citrus trees of 1,000 varieties.

It is here, at one of the world's most diverse living collections of citrus and its relatives, that ancient and new varieties of citrus are grown, studied and evaluated for their commercial worth.

This is the UC Riverside Citrus Variety Collection, where curator Tracy Kahn conducts research to help evaluate new varieties for nurseries, growers and, eventually, the general public, as well as educate people about the diverse fruit.


Paul Alvarez / The Press- Enterprise
Tracy Kahn, curator of the UC Riverside Citrus Variety Collection, inspects oranges in the collection. Kahn conducts research to help evaluate new varieties of citrus for nurseries, growers and, eventually, the general public. UCR's collection is the source of the fruit used in chef Brein Clements' citrus dinner.

The citrus collection drew the attention of chef Brein Clements, owner of Restaurant Omakase in downtown Riverside, who loves cooking with exotic varieties and has been invited to the prestigious James Beard House in New York to prepare a rare citrus dinner.

"One of the things he prides himself on is he wants to have locally grown ingredients," said Kahn. "His restaurant, as he says, uses Asian ingredients and he particularly likes citrus."

Kahn, who also teaches in UCR's department of botany and plant sciences, said that other chefs over the years have been interested in using some of the exotic citrus that is grown at the site.

Clements first contacted her a year ago, saying he wanted to buy some of the rare citrus grown in the collection, but the research facility really wasn't prepared to provide it on a commercial basis, she said.

"The things I was originally looking for were yuzu and sudachi, Japanese citruses, and she was the only one in the area who had them. They're very hard to find," Clements said.



The calamondin, native to the Philippines and China, has a sour taste at first with a sweet aftertaste. The peel is sweet as well. It is used to flavor drinks and food.

Kahn said she later gave Clements a bag of blood oranges left over from the 100th birthday celebration of the citrus facility. She dined at his restaurant later that day -- he didn't know she was coming -- and he had already prepared something with them.

"They were picked that morning and that night they were part of this sorbet. It was amazing. It was the essence of the fruit in a sorbet. It was pretty cool," Kahn said.

Clements proposed a citrus dinner at Restaurant Omakase, using fruit from the Citrus Variety Collection, with half the proceeds benefiting the facility. That dinner sold out in an hour and a half, he said.

Later, a newspaper story about the dinner caught the attention of the James Beard Foundation. An invitation to cook there followed. He and his staff will prepare three hors d'oeuvres and five dinner dishes on Dec. 6.

Kahn said that Clements uses only very small amounts of citrus in his dishes. "He likes things with high levels of acid, so this early (citrus) season works out OK. To make something less acid, he uses more sugar," she said.

A dish's main ingredient determines the kind of citrus he wishes to use, Clements said. "You don't want to use citrus, necessarily, up front. You want to use it as an accent flavor. You want to use it as the backbone of a dish."

Source: http://www.pe.com/lifestyles/stories/PE_Fea_Daily_D_dbltrk1128.1e28499.html