I kind of detest anything that is tasty but has many little inedible parts.
I think this explains some childhood behaviors I had with foods. In fact, long forgotten memories are revealing themselves - unfolding in my mind - as I think about this sensation. Specifically, eating sunflower seeds - it’s nice to know I still have some childhood memories left.
I’d get a bag of flavored sunflower seeds, still in their shells. Coated in sodium (and probably delicious MSG) rich powder that hits you over the head with either ranch or bbq flavors. I’d sit there trying to be like the adults with their seeds. Placing a single seed in my mouth, arranging it on edge between my molars, cracking it gently, separating the shell from the meat with my tongue, spitting the shells out, and eating the meat. A lot of work went into that one little piece of nut. With that process, I would get a just a hint of the flavor - and maybe that’s why they are so aggressively seasoned! But I wanted more than just that hint.
I envied the adults who could do this while keeping a reservoir of intact, ready to be worked on, seeds in one cheek. I still don’t know how that’s possible without drowning in saliva or choking.
When I was alone, instead of the steady, practiced dance of teeth and tongue, I’d gluttonously ram a fistful of seeds into my mouth and try to extract every ounce of flavor. Rapidly. If you’ve ever done this, you know that a ball of seeds like that is not as compact and easy to manage as you’d like. There are lots of gaps, nooks, and crannies for your saliva to go fill- which sounds like a good thing. Most of the surface area of the seeds are exposed to your mild digestive solvent, and it can go collect its bounty of flavor powder.
But when it comes time to retrieve that saliva, now laden with its dissolved flavor payload, you need to use suction to beckon it home. A problem now arises - suction does not work well in an environment with lots of gaps, nooks, and crannies - it loses its power, or the entire mass threatens to move as a unified object towards your throat.
Either you spit the mass out (it’s less satisfying than you want it to be) or you find a way to extract from it better.
So what’s the natural thing to do? Compact it. Make the mass of seeds and saliva more compact and reduce the large air pockets. Chew it. It’s what you do with your food already!
Once chewed, it can be literally sucked dry of all its delicious liquor, leaving you with essentially what feels like a ball of sharp hay in your mouth. Which, upon oral egress, leaves more of itself behind than seems appropriate, for you to pick out.
This finally led me to the final stage of gluttony - just eat the whole seed, shell and all.
So as a child, I found that if I wanted to eat sunflower seeds in public and get maximum flavor extraction, I needed to chew them whole and swallow.
But just like a Roman gladiator trying to show his fellow gladiators the importance of teamwork by getting the really strong guy to break a single arrow shaft in half and the telling him to break a full bundle of shafts all at once (which he will not be able to do), the seeds showed that they are far stronger than expected when they team up.
Meaning, only one or two seeds at a time, lest they unionize, demand better living conditions, and become a mass of wet fiber that I can do nothing with except spit out, revealing myself to the world as a seed chewer.
Anyway, things like that tend to take the same path. Guavas and pomegranates for sure. Lovely flavor, lots of kinda inedible parts, hard to dissociate the two, and a journey to try to extract the flavor and spit the inedible parts all out.
On to the point of all of this.
Kumquats are mostly seed I feel, though I don’t try to chew them. Citrus seeds are so bitter. I accidentally got some lemon seeds in an overly complicated tomato sauce I made in Rome, and when I unfortunately bit into a whole cooked lemon seed, it produced a memory that I still cannot remove from my brain.
So kumquats show up at the farmers market and I’m like, cool, these are seasonal and neat, let’s buy some.
I don’t really get what you’d do with them. Once you get the seeds out the insides are basically gone. So I figured the skin is where it’s at. A very sweet and warmly spiced vinegar syrup pickles them well, and produces a syrup that is great cocktails, shrubs, and salads.
I bet you could do this with other citrus peel too.
I wonder if you could then crystallize the peels - I should try that.