All my life I’ve been a collector. I’ve collected menus. I’ve collected matchbooks. I’ve collected English-language Chinese cookbooks. I was once accused of collecting dust. One of my current collections consists of pithy little phrases related to food. One phrase in my thoughts more than the rest is, “Good ingredients, barely touched.” (The phrase comes from the book Heat by Bill Buford, and is said by a cook named Andy who was describing the food at a tapas bar in the Mercat de la Boquería in Barcelona.)

It’s a simple statement, but so very correct. I am fortunate to live in an area where great produce is abundant, high-quality meat is plentiful, and fresh seafood is profuse. In most of my preparations, I strive to live up to those four words and do as little as needed to my fresh ingredients when I transform them into a meal.

Sometimes the concept of doing as little as possible becomes a bit murky. Case in point: The satsumas this year seemed especially good. I decided to enzymatically peel the segments of a couple to see how they would look. Enzymatic peeling is capable of totally removing the albedo from the segments, leaving behind just the juice vesicles. So if I enzymatically peel the segments am I doing as little as possible to the ingredient? At first glance it seems that I making a major change to it, but is the process much different than other peeling methods? Although edible, the albedo doesn’t taste especially good, so its removal seems reasonable. Then again, if I was eating the same fruit on the street, I would only remove the peel, and maybe the well-pronounced stringy portions in the middle of the fruit, before eating each segment with its albedo covering.

Whether I barely touch the satsuma segments or perform major alterations to each one, the result looks neat. Plus they taste much “purer” without their albedo.