Your Winter Quarantine Salvation Has Arrived

The Bittman x Bi-Rite Citrus Box is back! (It’s not the vaccine, but it WILL make you feel better.)

I’m not sure if you’ll remember, but about exactly a year ago I wrote this:

Sure, winter can be a drag (both in and out of the kitchen), but there’s one ingredient in particular that makes me look forward to it: citrus. When it’s in season (which it is right now), it’s as good as summer fruit. Of course, what we get in the northeast are usually those varieties that are grown large-scale, and bred not for flavor but for shelf-life, indestructability (if that’s a word), high yield, and so on. 

Wanting to see if I could get the best citrus grown in the US, I called my friend Sam Mogannam, who owns Bi-Rite Market, the fabulous grocery store in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, and asked – really, this was a big favor – if we could try to figure out a way to fill a pre-paid USPS shipping box with citrus and send it to my house. (We started with Fedex, which was prohibitively expensive and, incredibly, not as efficient.) 

This worked, we’re on our third such box, and I’m in citrus heaven. Even better, after my request (which was really little more than a whim, though I needed Meyer lemons, kumquats, and kishus), Bi-Rite is experimenting with making these citrus boxes available to anyone. You can just order on their website and a box of peak-season citrus will be shipped to your door. I can’t overstate how amazing this is.