Do you have any photos of the tree? Of the fruit?
Were the leaves trifoliate? Very thorny?
Yes and yes to the characteristics. Even the fuzz on the fruit. I don’t really need to post pictures because I’m sure enough what it is by comparing pictures of the tree to what I’ve seen and the fruit I have. Unless someone suggests all fruit of the species has very thick skin like the photo in wiki. What z6 fruit is similar?
On a related note, I think trifoliate orange has good leaves for cooking. Its foliage has a lemon grass like fragrance and I’ve used them a couple times to impart flavor in dishes.
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There are numerous varieties of “hardy” citrus. Trifoliate orange is just one of them. C35 is another.
They all have varying degrees of hardiness but all have bitter, nasty tasting fruit.
Yuzu is very pleasant tasting.
The trifoliate I have tried was not nasty. It made a pleasant beverage. There is variation within the species.
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Couldn’t help myself and got this when I saw it at the store yesterday:
It’s a pretty disappointingly mild flavor, but was improved by combining with tequila.
I wish they had made it with just yuzu, I mostly taste the lime.
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I was thinking that many years ago, Mr.Texas posted (on the old GW forums) a recipe for trifoliate lemonade… something like this:
Juice of one trifoliate orange
50 lb sugar
50 gallons water
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Look for a product called 유자차 (sometimes
written as 柚子茶). It sounds like “yuja-cha” and means yuzu tea. It is mostly yuzu and sweetener and looks like marmalade. You mix a spoonful with hot water to make a tasty beverage from it.
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That recipe is bull. I used 2-3 trifoliate oranges with a little sweetener and a pitcher of water and found it was very mild.
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I’m pretty sure it was meant as a joke…that certainly was my intent in reposting it!
I can believe that you could make some decent ‘lemonade’ from trifoliate fruits if you could juice them without that nasty oil from the rind getting into the mix. But… as you indicated it’d take several to generate enough juice to work with, as mine are VERY SEEDY.
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I agree it was with joking intent, but I also know that behind the joke there is a man who repeatedly tries to discourage people from pursuing cold hardy Citrus. Jokes should be funny even if they’re libelous, but if they’re only libelous then I consider them a fail.
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Trifoliate ade juice drink: caution you are not being poisoned it only tastes that way IMHO.
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You’ve said that so many times. I think everyone here is aware you think the trifoliate is worthless for fruit. I don’t think you need to keep telling us the exact same thing word for word over and over. That said, I respect your experience and input, but please give it a rest on this front. lol 
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Honestly most citrus tastes horrible on there own. Almost all of the citrus family is bitter and sour. Mandarins are not all sweet they naturally have the same poncirin trifoliate has. It’s simply been breed out of modern fruits and selected for sweetness.
Limons, limes and oranges are the most unnatural citrus of them all, balanced flavor profiles with plenty of juice. They are the retarded children of the inbread citrus family tree.
You can’t judge trifoliate, hysterix or papedas like you would one of there offspring
That being said trifoliate has a great taste. Just dilute it with one of the citrus bastards.
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I would like to share my recent experience with yuzu: I was visiting a nearby restaurant for the first time and noticed that the menu listed a tuna tataki that had a glaze which included juice from a yuzu. I jumped at the chance to taste the juice of a fruit that I had heard mentioned so very many times in a GrowingFruit.org thread on cold tolerant citrus trees, and I was not disappointed. I enjoyed that flavor so very much that I texted a friend about how good it tasted, and I promptly added yuzu to my list of additional fruit trees to source.
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I visited someone today that had like a hundred Trifoliate Orange seedlings (and 10-20 larger trees) in NJ.
Think one type was the “curved-thorn” type (maybe ‘Flying Dragon’ variety which was the prettiest), and then he had a straight-thorn type (I’m not sure what he said but maybe this was Korean?). He also had some other cold-hardy citrus possibly.
Anyway I got a couple seedlings from him to give to my friend to grow.
He had a hundred fruit in his freezer and we cut one open to try it.
He used gloves to cut as I assume thats the oil/resin some people mentioned this fruit has (and he mentioned when he is doing alot of them, the knives get that resin on it as well (as ediblelandscaping mentioned above).
I really liked its flavor. He made a lemonade from the saved concentrate he had, which was good.
I really enjoyed it fresh with food the most though.
I got home and added some of the inside pulp/juice to a chicken stew and it tasted delicious (can really taste the fragrant pulp in there). So many seeds, prob removed 15 of them.
It reminds me of tiny bit of the bitter ‘Persian Lime’ that you’d use to flavor some Iranian stews/soups.
When you smell it, it does remind me of that Yuzu flavor you see in flavored drinks.
I wanna try it with fish (or with raw oysters w/ tobasco) soon and report back how it is.
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That’s a good looking tree and some good sized fruits!
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My first successful graft was a flying dragon onto a Meyer lemon or a hybrid. At first, I thought it was a mandarin. Then found out, the real mandarin died or was accidentally cut because it was growing slower than the flying dragon. No wonder it tasted awful. Some fruit tasted bitter or sour. The tree no longer exist. I cut it out and even the stump. All that left, is the unwanted flying dragon graft. I left it alone since it was my first successful graft.
The fruit in the photo from wikipedia is not correct for FD.
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I just found out there has been research indicating that the poncirin gets metabolized by the human intestine into ponciretin which inhibits Helicobactor pylori (a leading cause of stomach ulcers). Too bad it doesn’t get metabolized into an effective form in the stomach, but maybe someone could discover a supplement to take with poncirin to metabolize it sooner so it can be active already when entering the stomach. That would definitely make some people appreciate the off flavor of trifoliate oranges!
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