The best piece of citrus I have ever eaten was a tiny, wrinkled thing the size of a quail egg. After I peeled away its loose skin, I found a prepossessing little fruit, perfect and rotund, its segments bulging with juice. When I popped the whole thing into my mouth, the flavor was astounding: bright and sweet with a kick of acid. Before I knew it, the 25-pound box I’d ordered was empty. All that was left was the delicate scent of the discarded peels.
These perfect little flavor bombs were kishus, a type of Mandarin grown in only a few orchards in California and Florida and sold during a very brief window in February. This citrus had nothing in common with the dry, sugary clementines I usually resign myself to at the grocery store, even though their origins are the same. (Mandarins, it turns out, are the genetic ancestor of almost all the citrus fruits we eat today.)
Seedless kishus have only been growing in the U.S. since 1983, when citrus researchers at the University of California at Riverside received cuttings from Japanese kishu trees. When the trees started producing, the growers dismissed the kishus as too “cute” and small to find commercial success. Some of the graduate students, though, loved the tiny fruits and passed them along to a grower in Ojai who planted a small flock of kishu trees in his orchard.
That grower was Jim Churchill, who, along with his wife and partner Lisa Brenneis, own Churchill Orchard, the first orchard in the country to produce kishus commercially. They now maintain close to 1,000 kishu trees and ship the fruit across the U.S.—this year the crop sold out in two weeks.
Of course, nothing good comes easy, and kishus are no exception. “They’re the difficult child of the orchard,” says Brenneis. “Compared to everything else we grow, this is the hardest.” They’re sensitive to temperature and aridity, so a stretch of bad weather can wreck a crop. They’re also tiny, so it takes a lot of them to fill a box, and the trees tend to produce less and less fruit over time. The short, intense kishu harvest lasts only a few weeks in January. As soon as the fruit comes off the tree, flats go zooming off to the Berkeley farmers' market; to a southern California specialty fruits distributor; and to the post office, where boxes are dispatched to loyal customers across the country. Churchill Orchard won’t ship to the northeastern U.S. unless you’re prepared to sign for the fruit on delivery; letting the box sit outside in the frost would be sacrilege.
And don’t you want to taste the fruit in its most perfect form? Don’t you want to taste the mandarin that Chez Panisse has served, peeled and placed on a plate, as a dessert course? What Churchill is looking for, Brenneis says, are fruits that are “intrinsically good,” the ones that will make you come back to them, over and over. Kishus are exactly that, and, each January, I make sure to get my hand on as many as I can of those perfectly scented tiny mandarins.