Yuzu cake with yuzu glaze
Substitute with lemon or lime for the most fragrant citrus loaf cake
Published originally on my blog on 23 February 2023
Other than chocolate, my favorite flavor for cakes of any kind is citrus. Case(s) in point: bergamot drizzle cake, lemon cake with Greek wild thyme honey glaze, blood orange semolina syrup cake, lemon, polenta and yoghurt cake, Greek portokalopita with blood oranges, and lemon and honey madeleines. For this cake, the citrus I chose is super special; it’s yuzu.
I love the flavor of yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit that’s as unique as bergamot. And even though I have grown up with the flavor and aroma of bergamots as they are abundant in Greece, yuzu is a flavor I first tasted about a decade ago.
Yuzu is a small citrus fruit that originated in China but has been grown in Japan for over a thousand years. It can be yellow or green and has a bumpy, uneven, thick surface. Only its juice and zest are used in cooking and is rarely eaten as a fruit.
The flavor of yuzu is reminiscent of lemon, but sweeter. It is almost like a mix of lemon, mandarin, lime and grapefruit, with floral and herbal hints reminiscent of pine and thyme, and it’s highly aromatic. It has such a unique flavor that the only way to really understand it is to taste it.
The actual fruit is rarely found outside of Japan and even inside Japan, fresh yuzu is considered special, but luckily, yuzu juice is sold in small bottles in Asian/Japanese food stores. The juice inside the fruit is minimal and it takes a lot of yuzu fruits to get one small bottle, so that makes it quite expensive. If however you’re really into tasting something different and you don’t mind splurging on a food item, then I’d say go for it, even just once. Just be careful to buy 100% yuzu juice, because some brands blend the yuzu juice with other citrus fruits and/or vinegar.
Yuzu has the ability to maintain its sourness and tartness when cooked in high temperatures which makes it ideal for use in cakes.
Along with its beautiful aroma, acidity and slight sweetness, yuzu made this cake taste amazing and incredibly fragrant. With a soft, dense (but not stodgy) and slightly moist texture, it won over even my most demanding of cake tasters, my partner.
