Florida's Duncan Grapefruit
The yellow, heirloom citrus is the best you've never tasted
March is a miserable month for fresh fruit, but there is one burst of sunshine: Florida grapefruit. And one of the sweetest we've tasted is the Duncan, a brilliantly pale yellow, heirloom variety grown by CeeBee's Citrus, a family-run farm in Odessa, Florida.
While other operations choose to cultivate seedless varieties or grapefruit that have a long shelf life, CeeBee's sticks with flavor. The irony, says CeeBee's Ken Hooley, is that seeds help give a fruit its sweetness. "Some people can't get past that," he says, "but that's true of all citrus." And CeeBee's Duncans–said to be the first grapefruit propagated in the United States and the mother of all American specimens–are so sweet that you can skip your usual spoonful of sugar.
To make sure you get your Duncans in perfection condition, CeeBee's (which also offers honeybells, tangerines, tangelos, navel oranges and ruby red and flame grapefruits) picks the fruit right before it's shipped (free of charge for most states). Just pay attention to the weather: If temperatures are well below freezing where you live, the company won't send the fruit off until the cold snap passes.
Duncan grapefruit are $36 for a quarter bushel (six to eight grapefruit) at ceebeescitrus.com