Holistic Citrus Cake

Consistently connecting without crumbling

It’s crazy how much flavor gets tossed without a second thought. But once you’ve been fermenting for a bit, that second thought happens—and leads easily to creating super delicious ingredients from byproducts instead of composting them or throwing them out. This practice has been integrated into our cooking for several years at this point, and we’re here to show you that it doesn’t take much of an adjustment to include fermentation in your regular food prep plan. One of the keys to this holistic approach is literally using every last bit.

Chef Matt Orlando is a huge advocate of this practice. His mantra is “No such thing as a byproduct, only another product.” One wonderful example of this is the no waste citrus “miso” that his R&D colleague Chef Kim Wejendorp developed. He used the remains of lemons after they’re zested and juiced to make an amino paste. One would imagine that the bitterness would be too overwhelming, but amazingly it tastes like olive and lemon. We couldn’t help but include the recipe in Koji Alchemy.

My entire house has been under construction for two years this month, which has left me without an oven for too long. I often get the itch to bake and Marissa pushed me over the edge by messaging me a whole orange cake recipe. This luckily coincided with delicious navel oranges and kumquats I had on hand from Bhumi Growers. Off we went…

Marissa graciously invited me over to use her oven and of course provide her pastry chef guidance (AKA What are you doing? This is how you should do it). We used Kristen Milglore’s Food52 whole orange cake recipe as a base and tweaked it because we wanted to dial back the sugar so it would really highlight the awesome citrus. Somehow during the process I ended up flying kites with Marissa’s daughters in the backyard while she did her magic in the kitchen.

Once the cake cooled, we included chocolate cake gochujang by adding a tablespoon to the glaze. That touch of complexity and umami (and chocolate LOVES oranges) tamed the sweetness and made the citrus pop. You don’t even have to go through the trouble of making a glaze to enjoy how well it works—this idea applies to mixing an umami condiment into any syrup/sugar in your kitchen. Try a teaspoon of gochujang in a cup of honey for drizzling over peanut butter on sliced apples. Or mash a teaspoon of miso into a cup of granulated sugar and use it to sweeten your coffee or chai.

With the remaining kumquats, we’re preserving them with salt and Cultured Pickle Shop sunchoke kasuzuke from 2018. What are you doing with whole citrus?

Details on tweaks to the cake recipe:

• Instead of just oranges, we used three medium naval oranges plus 10 kumquats with seeds removed.

• Reduced the sugar by 15%

• Swapped out 20% of the AP flour for cornstarch to make the crumb more tender