The Prettiest Upside-Down Citrus Cake You've Ever Seen

Plus: The Best Omakase of My Life at Morihiro, Meyer Lemon Bars, Short Rib Onion Soup, and Tejal Rao on Lunch Therapy.

Hey everyone,

Citrus is happening in L.A. right now. Everywhere I go, I see oranges, grapefruits, lemons, limes — even when we’re just walking Winston, I see trees sagging with pomelos and tangelos and Meyer lemons. I realize if you’re in a cold climate, you’re probably reading this right now and thinking: “Screw you and your citrus!” Look, I get it. L.A. has its drawbacks — narcissism run amok, plastic surgery clinics on every corner — but when it comes to citrus, this place is paradise.

And so it was that I found myself overwhelmed with Meyer lemons (a gift from our neighbor Tony) and Cara Cara oranges and blood oranges (from the farmer’s market) plus two Pomelos that we found in a box on the street.

What’s a person to do with all of this citrus? Turns out: you bake with it. And I baked two wonderful things this past week, both of them recipes by the one and only Melissa Clark. I’ll share the first with you here — it’s that gorgeous cake you see above — and I’ll link to the other (lemon bars with olive oil and sea salt!) later in the newsletter.

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The Recipe: Upside-Down Citrus Cake

Upside-down cakes are sort of retro — think upside-down pineapple cake, banana cake, etc. — but there’s something very modern about an upside-down citrus cake with lots of blood oranges, cara cara oranges (which are pinkish inside), and street pomelos. My advice is to make this with the biggest variety of citrus you can find (try tangerines, etc.) and make your own stained-glass window to impress your guests. Here’s a TikTok of how I put this together.

Adam Roberts @amateurgourmet

California should pay me for advertising living here. 🍊🍊🍊

The hardest part is cutting the rind off the citrus. My advice: use a very sharp knife, be bold, slice the tops and bottoms off first, and then follow the shape of the fruit as you cut. Just make sure to cut all of the pith away too, or it won’t be as pretty.

Based on a NYT by Melissa Clark

Note: I’m trying to figure out how to make these recipes printable on Substack (any advice?), but for right now your best bet is to copy and paste into a doc you can print.

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks + 3 tablespoons of unsalted butter at room temperature (plus more for greasing)

• 2/3 cup light brown sugar

• 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

• 4 to 6 assorted citrus fruits: ideally, a mix of blood oranges, Cara Cara oranges, and a small grapefruit (you’ll only use a portion of each, but better to have more to play with; snack on the rest)

• 1 cup fine cornmeal (I used coarse cornmeal and Craig said it was “too gritty,” so now we’re in a fight)

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour

• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

• 1 cup granulated sugar

• 4 large eggs, room temperature

• 1/3 cup sour cream

• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract (not imitation)

  

Instructions:

1. Heat the oven to 350. Grease a 9-inch cake pan with softened butter (about a tablespoon; you can use cooking spray, but I think butter adds more flavor and also helps it detach better).

2. In a pot, melt the 3 tablespoons of butter, then add the brown sugar and the lemon juice. Whisk on medium heat just until the sugar dissolves, then pour into the cake pan.

3. Now it’s time to deal with the fruit: zest two of the oranges and set the zest aside. Then carefully cut away the skin and pith using a sharp knife. Slice into 1/4-inch rings and arrange over the brown sugar mixture in the cake pan. Keep in mind that however it looks now is how it will look when you flip it out. Channel your inner Cézanne.

4. In a large bowl, whisk together the orange zest, corn meal, flour, baking powder, and kosher salt. In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream the butter and granulated sugar until light and fluffy (about 3 to 4 minutes on medium-high speed). Add the eggs one at a time, then beat in the sour cream and vanilla, being sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl as you mix. Remove from the mixer and fold in the dry ingredients by hand.

5. Pour the mixture over the fruit, spread out the top, and then bake in the oven for 40 to 50 minutes, until a cake tester comes out clean. Allow to cool for 10 minutes then, very carefully (wear oven mitts), place a cake stand or serving dish on top of the cake pan and flip it upside down. Bang on it once or twice and then slowly lift up. If any fruit sticks to the bottom of the pan, it’s okay. Just use an offset spatula to remove it and place it where it needs to go.

6. Allow to cool completely, then serve with freshly whipped cream.

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The Restaurant: Morihiro

Imagine that a sushi restaurant opens up in your neighborhood. It’s so close you can walk to it.

Now imagine that the restaurant is heralded as one of the best sushi restaurants in L.A. (see here) and getting a reservation seems nearly impossible.

You’d be frustrated. You’d be annoyed. You’d be ready to call it quits and just continue going to Sugarfish. But then it’s Christmas and you want to get something cool for your sushi-loving husband, so you plan two months ahead and score a reservation for January. And that’s how it came about that Craig and I had dinner at Morihiro on Friday night.

I went in expecting a delightful, if predictable, fancy omakase dinner. What I ended up experiencing was maybe the best sushi meal of my life.

Let me explain, before you accuse me of hyperbole: before the pandemic, Craig and I went to Japan and we ate sushi in Tokyo. It was at Sushi Ginza Onodero and it had all the hallmarks of a refined sushi destination: a beautiful wooden sushi counter, interactive chefs who put live shrimp on the bar to crawl over to you before they boiled them in hot water. It was exciting but also, maybe, a little gimmicky.

There's nothing gimmicky about Morihiro. He’s an L.A. sushi legend who’s full of personality and likes to crack jokes from behind the sushi bar while sipping whiskey:

Everything at Morihiro is idiosyncratic and thoughtful. For starters, he makes all of the ceramic dishes himself. Each course feels specific and unexpected, and when it is something expected (like a platter full of sushi), it’s prepared with such care, you feel like you’re eating at somebody’s house, instead of a restaurant.

This presentation alone — of monkfish liver, salmon roe, abalone, and a sun gold tomato in gelee — was so gorgeous (and again, he made that platter himself), I wanted to hang it on a wall as much as I wanted to eat it. Each bite was a study in texture: the creamy liver, the salty pop of the roe, the chewiness of the abalone, and the squeaky bite of gelee.

We opted for a sake pairing, which I highly recommend. Each pour (four in total) was also a surprise, starting with this sparkling sake, which was a festive start to the meal.

I won’t go into every course, but highlights included this mackerel course, featuring three different kinds of mackerel on Chef Mori’s signature rice, which he polishes himself each morning and mixes with a special kind of vinegar.

This sushi course was the most surprising: I was excited to eat cooked prawns, but nervous to eat raw clams because I thought they would be too rubbery. How wrong I was: again, it was a masterclass in textures, each bite a different sensation, but way more chewable than I expected.

There was, of course, the traditional array of sushi — including halibut, needlefish, yellowtail, tuna, and fatty tuna — and each bite was more gorgeous than the last.

My favorite bite of the night was the uni imported from Japan (on the right, in the back); while the Santa Barbara uni (on the left, in the back) was creamy and rich, the Japanese uni had a real funk and depth to it that completely wowed me.

Dessert was equally thoughtful and beautiful and refined.

The Asian pear was cold and crisp in a way that made me desperate to know what he did to it. And in the center another gelee, this time with a baby peach from Japan.

Who would’ve guessed that my favorite sushi spot in the world would be the one right in my own backyard? It’s very Wizard of Oz (Gizard of Jaws? That could be a dish?). But the next time there’s a special occasion — the meal wasn’t cheap — I know where we’re headed for a dreamy sushi dinner.

Morihiro / 3133 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90039 / (323) 522-3993

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The Rest: Meyer Lemon Bars, Short Rib French Onion Soup, and Tejal Rao on Lunch Therapy.

It seems like I wasn’t just on a citrus kick last week, I was on a Melissa Clark citrus recipe kick. Not only did I make her upside-down cake that you see above, I also made her lemon bars with olive oil and sea salt (recipe here). I used Meyer lemons, which are a bit sweeter, so I cut down the sugar by half a cup and they came out perfect. I mean check this one out.

That would’ve been my lead picture for this week’s newsletter, but the upside-down citrus cake one by a hair. Either way, both recipes are great.

And speaking of great recipes: I was obsessed with Deb’s recipe for Short Rib Onion Soup when she posted it in December. To me, it was pure genius. You braise short ribs for three hours:

Then you shred the meat and strain the liquid and turn it into French Onion soup with Gruyere toasts.

I served this to our friends Carey and Simon and they were totally wowed.

Here’s the finished soup (I supplemented with more beef broth and doctored it a little with Balsamic and Tabasco, like Naomi Pomeroy taught me to do in my cookbook):

It’s a masterpiece of a recipe. Bravo, Deb!

Hey, guess who’s on Lunch Therapy this week? Tejal Rao, the California restaurant critic for The New York Times and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine. Here’s a little snippet of our talk (for obvious reasons, she couldn’t appear on video, so she’s a head of radicchio).

Adam Roberts @amateurgourmet

This week on Lunch Therapy: a head of radicchio. Just kidding, it’s @tejalrao: California food critic for @nytimes, a cooking columnist at @NYTmag, and author of the vegetarian newsletter The Veggie. Listen to the whole thing here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lun…

You can listen to our whole interview here and it covers everything from how she writes her reviews to claiming that California has better bagels than New York in the NYT and the hate mail she got as a result.

Also: if you missed it, I had David Lebovitz on the pod at the end of last week to talk about his big announcement that he’s shifting his blog to a Substack newsletter.

Adam Roberts @amateurgourmet

My old school food blogging friend @davidlebovitz came on Lunch Therapy today to talk about his announcement that he's shifting his blog to a Substack newsletter. Is this where all food blogs are headed? Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lun…

You can listen to that whole episode here:

Now for some links that caught my attention recently:

• Bobby Finger goes deep on Joanna Gaines’s perfect peanut butter brownies (Eater);

• I like the looks of Deb’s lentil salad (Smitten Kitchen);

• I’m not particularly into the idea of a chocolate chip cookie without the chocolate chips, but maybe you are? (A small list of knowable things).

That’s all for this week, folks! (And wow, was that a lot.)

In case you missed it, I went a bit further after my discussion with David and wrote an essay on Thursday for paid subscribers only called When Food Blogs Become Newsletters. If you’d like to read that, plus have access to my full archives, here’s a discount code that gets you a lifetime subscription for 20% off. how could you say no to that? (Also, you becoming a paid subscriber motivates me to keep writing these epic newsletters! It’s called patronizing the arts, people!)

Until next time….

Your friend,

Adam