(gentle music) - Hello, I'm Giuliano Hazan, and today, I'm going to make one of my mother's recipes from her cookbook, "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking."

One of the things my mother was famous for was getting incredible flavor out of very simple and few ingredients.

So these marinated oranges, my mother calls them macerated oranges, are a perfect example of that.

I'm gonna begin by paring away the rind from the oranges.

(bright music) And then do the other side as well.

And then I wanna pare away the rind, including the white pith underneath.

The white pith underneath is kind of bitter, so we don't want to have it.

And make sure as you're cutting it with your knife that you're following the shape of the orange.

You don't want to just cut straight down.

The orange is rounded.

By the way, this is also a great way to remove the rind from a melon.

I always remove the rind from the melon first hole and then slice it, much easier than removing the rind after it's sliced.

There, that's good.

And then I'm gonna slice across like this, and I'm gonna hope that there aren't any seeds, because if there are seeds, you have to remove them.

The seeds, so they give off a bitter oil, especially when you cut through them.

And so you don't want them in, but I think we're in luck here.

These are seedless oranges.

And then when you finished slicing the orange, we're going to place it in our serving bowl here.

And let's do the next orange.

So now various ingredients that the oranges marinate with.

One of them is going to be the rind from a lemon.

Just like with the orange, we don't want any of the white pith, we just want the yellow part of the rind.

And we have granulated sugar.

And then we're going to juice some of the orange just so that we have enough juice.

I'm going to pour it in.

And then I'm gonna juice about half of the lemon.

(gentle music) And then we'll pour the lemon juice onto our oranges.

Those are all the ingredients that go in here.

All I have to do is just stir.

So I teach this at our cooking school in Italy, and one of the things my students always ask is, "Are you sure that there shouldn't be something else in here?

It seems like there really isn't very much."

The thing is, it really is delicious just as is.

If you really wanted to, you could put in maybe a cherry brandy perhaps, but it's really fine without it.

And I always do it without it.

My mother always used to do it without it.

Okay, we're ready to cover the oranges, and we're gonna put them in the fridge for about two hours, two to three hours.

Okay, here we go.

And here are our oranges, ready to taste them.

And I like to give them one last toss since they've been sitting there all this time.

Make sure that you're putting some juice in there as well, because the juice is the best part.

See how they turned out.

Mm.

They're so refreshing.

And I particularly like these after a seafood meal because it just cleanses your palette.

I hope you'll try them, and that you'll enjoy them.

Buon appetito.

(spoon clanking)