11 Myths About Clementines You Should Stop Believing

What exactly are clementines? It might be a question you ask yourself more than you think. On the surface, they're naturally a citrus fruit, and a vibrant, orange, normally-sweet bundle of joy which are as good coated in chocolate as they are simmered into a chutney or stirred into a clementine spritz. However, if you dig beneath the surface, you'll find a plant that's shrouded in mistruths and misunderstandings. Clementines appear to be interchangeable with other citrus fruits, and in that slight grey area, a lot of myths about clementines have started to breed. As a result, nobody really knows what the heck they are, or what they're meant to be.

Well, we're here to reveal all, folks. This surprisingly controversial fruit has had years of people assuming that it's interchangeable with the mandarin, or that you can't eat it when its peel is green. It's also easy to think that there's only one type of clementine out there, or that it grows at certain types of the year, or that it's always seedless. Its origins, too, are a little less straightforward than you think. Ready to learn the truth about this delectable fruit? We've got all the info you need, right here.

There's a general rule when it comes to fruit: If it's still green, it's not ready to eat as it's still unripe. Is that absolutely the case when it comes to clementines, though? You might be surprised to hear that no, it isn't. If citrus fruits like clementines have green peels, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not ripe yet. Rather, a clementine having a green peel is an indication that it's been grown in a climate with a steady temperature. If there's a greater fluctuation of temperatures (especially at nighttime), your clementines will be more orange, and if the temperature remains unchanging it'll likely be more green. Either way, it'll be sweet and juicy when it's at peak ripeness.

Having said all this, there's a difference between a clementine having a green tint while still being ripe, and it being unready for consumption. The best way to tell is by assessing its firmness. If your clementine feels slightly firm but with a touch of give to it, it's probably good to go. If it feels like a rock between your fingers and is totally unyielding, you should leave it alone.

What's a clementine, and what's a mandarin? Aren't they just the same thing? We can see why a lot of people think so. Clementines and mandarins look pretty much identical, they're roughly the same size, and to a less discerning palette, they also taste the same. They are, however, different from each other, with clementines actually stemming from mandarins as a sub-fruit that turned into a strand of its own.

Clementines were first created by crossbreeding willowleaf mandarins with regular oranges. This combination gave them a few unique qualities, one of which is their normally seedless nature. Crossbreeding mandarins with oranges also resulted in clementines being slightly hardier and having a thicker peel than the former fruit, and it also allows them to be slightly more resistant to lower temperatures. They can also be a touch sweeter than mandarins, but have less of a pronounced scent. If you're just grabbing one as a snack on your way past the fruit bowl, you may not notice any huge difference between the two. However, you should also avoid assuming that they're exactly the same as each other, and in certain recipes, it may be obvious that you've opted for a clementine instead of a mandarin.

Think of fruits in the orange family, and you probably think of summer. We get why: Citrus fruits, in all their bright and aromatic glory, often conjure up feelings of long, warm days and refreshing beverages. However, while clementines may be a favorite during summer, they actually don't grow during the season at all. Clementines are in fact a winter fruit, and they are perfectly in season and are ready for harvesting from November to March, after flowering in the spring and going through a potential second flowering in the autumn months.

That's not to say that you don't need to do anything to clementines during the summer, though. Growing these fruits is a year-round affair, and how you treat them in the hottest months of the year can determine how successfully they bear fruit. Clementine trees need to be kept in full sunshine for the best results from April onwards. Having said this, it's a pretty easygoing fruit to grow, and doesn't require a huge amount of work to keep its plants alive and thriving. Thanks to year-round farming practices, too, you can always find clementines in stores at any time of the year. Whether they'll be the best in the middle of summer is another question.

Part of the appeal of clementines is their juicy sweetness. While there will always be bitter fruits out there, clementines are fairly reliably sweet and have a candy-like quality that you don't always get with oranges or mandarins. However, this sweetness also means that clementines don't always seem as nutritious as these other two options, as some folks equate sourness with a kind of healthiness and sugary flavors with snacks that will spike your blood glucose.

That isn't entirely true. Clementines are in fact highly nutritious, and have a lot going for them in terms of their vitamin, mineral, and fiber content. One regular clementine has just under seven grams of sugar, but it also delivers 1.25 grams of fiber. This fiber can help to reduce the impact of the sugar on your blood glucose, and stop it from sending your energy flying upward and then crashing. You'll also get just over 36 milligrams of vitamin C, which equates to approximately 40% of your daily value. Clementines also deliver a small amount of folate and thiamine, and help to keep you hydrated.

We've all been in the disastrous position of trying to tear into an orange, only to find that half of its peel remains glued to the fruit. One way to avoid this is by buying clementines, which are famously easy to peel. Or are they? It's actually a myth that clementines are always easy to peel, and you might find that certain types are much harder to get into than others. Although most ripe clementines tear open pretty easily, if they're a little dry or unripe the skin can have difficulty separating from the flesh, therefore ruining your precious fruit.

Naturally, the smart thing to do is to wait until your clementine is totally ripe before peeling it. However, if you've ended up with a bunch of fruits that clearly needed more time before being picked, there are some ways to get into them more easily. All you need to do is take your clementine and roll it between your hands. This can help the skin loosen up and make it easier to tear away, although you'll want to be careful not to crush the fruit in the process.

Clementines grow on trees, so surely those trees can be found around the world, right? Well, yes, but someone had to place them there. A common misconception about clementines is that they can be found in the wild, but that's not the case at all. Because clementines are a hybrid of the mandarin and the bitter orange and are largely seedless, they have to be planted and cultivated instead of growing at random.

Interestingly, though, a lot of other citrus fruits aren't found in the wild either — including the orange, which is a hybrid of the pomelo and the mandarin. Grapefruits, too, are a hybrid fruit that first appeared in 18th century Barbados and promptly took over the world with their sour, tart, aromatic nature. Even lemons are a hybrid, and while they've been around for a long time, they've been cultivated by people for generations to get the best flavor and scent possible. It takes a lot of work for something to taste this good, folks.

You're probably not thinking that much about the specific types of clementine you're eating, right? To you, a clementine is just a clementine. Well, that may be true, but these fruits are far from a one-size-fits-all scenario. Instead, clementines come in a host of different varieties, with around a dozen prominent clementine types that you can find in stores. Although they're all fairly similar to one another, they can vary in terms of shape and flavor and are often in season at different times.

If you're buying your clementines early in the season, around the late fall time, you may end up with an oronules or clemenrubi clementine. Both of these are medium-sized, although the clemenrubi tends to be a little smaller, and its skin can be mottled green as well as orange. Later in the season, you may be purchasing esbal or beatriz clementines, with the beatriz having a slightly bumpy skin — although both of them have a delightfully sweet flavor. At the very end of the season come the hernandina and nandorcott clementines, which have juicy fruit and a lovely sweetness, although the hernandina can have a pretty green skin.

One of the biggest selling points of clementines is that they don't have any seeds. This can make the process of eating them so much easier than chomping through an orange or a mandarin, during which you have to spit out pips non-stop and risk crunching into them and ruining your experience. However, one key misconception about clementines is that they never, ever have seeds, and that's actually not true.

Most clementines are of course seedless, with the plant propagating through a process called grafting, which involves taking one of its branches and attaching it to a pre-existing stump. This allows them to grow without the regular process of the seeds dropping to the ground and sprouting from the soil. However, the mutation that led to clementines being seedless didn't pass its way down to all of the different types of the fruit, and certain varieties out there do have seeds, which gives them a self-compatibility that allows them to grow of their own volition. The fruit having seeds doesn't make it any less of a clementine, though, so you can rest assured that you're getting the real thing.

Clementines are often thought to have a longer history than they actually do, thanks to the fact that they originated from the mandarin. This latter citrus fruit first appeared in southern China as a wild plant in antiquity, and the common mandarin eventually took its place as the dominant version of the fruit. It's easy, therefore, to think that clementines had the same path, given how similar they are.

The truth, though, is that clementines were first discovered and cultivated in Algeria in the 19th century. A monk named Father Clément allegedly found the hybrid fruit amongst his mandarin trees, and the variety quickly took off as a firm favorite. As you've probably figured out, the name of the clementine comes from this discovery and the person who found it. Clementines rapidly made their way over to the United States, where they were first grown in California in the early years of the 20th century. The establishment of clementines in the area no doubt contributed to the large citrus fruit industry in the state.

Tangerines, clementines, satsumas: What's the difference between all of them? Is there a difference at all? Well, we can tell you the answer to that second one: Yes, there is. A lot of people think that clementines, tangerines, and satsumas are interchangeable names for the same fruit, but that's not the case. The fact is that all of them are varieties or hybrids of the original mandarin orange, and within each one, there are different sub-varieties that add increased diversity to these little fruits.

Tangerines are known for their lurid orange color, and they also have a touch more sourness than clementines, which can be super sweet. They also tend to have a thicker, tougher skin than clementines or satsumas, and they're seeded, whereas clementines and satsumas are usually seedless. Speaking of satsumas, they usually have the easiest skin to peel of the three types, and are well-known for their juiciness. However, they also tend to be more tender than the other two types of orange. If you're not paying much attention, you'll likely not be able to tell the difference between the three — but it is important to know that they're different.

Oranges and clementines are different — there's no getting around that fact. Clementines are smaller, often sweeter, and can have a slightly less aromatic quality than their larger counterpart. Because of this, it can feel like they can be used in similar but not identical ways in your recipes, with clementines not giving your dishes as much complexity or punch as you'd get with an orange. That's not entirely the case, though, and clementines can be swapped into recipes pretty easily when oranges are called for.

One substitute for oranges that works especially well is in stir-fries. Using clementines to make orange chicken or throwing chunks of it into your stir-fries can give them an increased sweetness that oranges sometimes lack, and you'll get arguably a more easygoing version of the dish. Clementines are also great in fennel salads, where they can give the same citrus pop of orange but in a slightly less intense manner. Oh, and don't forget that you can use them in basically any dessert that calls for oranges, and you can also harness their power in a clementini.