SOMETHING SIMPLE: Grapefruit Brûlée With Pistachio-Coconut Yogurt

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My favorite food is an ephemeral thing; it changes with the seasons. In spring, I’m a tender-herb girl, sprinkling a torn handful of fresh basil or dill into most every meal. Come July, there is no greater delight in my mind than standing over the kitchen sink, eating a drippy sun-ripened peach, hoping no one walks in to see the juice running down to my elbow. Once fall arrives, you can find me at my butcher block, chopping up yet another butternut squash to roast with garlic, olive oil, and warm spices.

And in January? It’s the grapefruit for me, baby.

Every winter, I take the arrival of seasonal citrus at my local grocery co-op as proof that Mother Nature has got my back. When the days in Minnesota have grown impossibly short and dark, when the glare ice at the end of my driveway has melted and refrozen into an impenetrable glassy danger sheet, when the air is so frigid that my garage door opener has simply ceased to function — when we’ve all arrived together at the apotheosis of winter, wondering how we’ve weathered it in the past and if we can manage to do so again: That’s citrus season.

Of course, your winter may be milder than mine. (I hope that it is.) And thanks to global shipping, we can buy citrus from the grocery store at any time of year. But the sweetest, tartest, most precious peak-season grapefruit always arrive, jewel-like in the very depths of winter, at precisely the moment we need it most.

And while you might mistake half a grapefruit on your breakfast plate for a beam of light on a dark morning, it’s not just a metaphor.

Sure, citrus fruits are bright and dazzling, but they also imbue our ­diets with a unique array of nutrients to benefit our bodies during cold and flu season, including a megadose of vitamin C for protecting immune health and reducing oxidative stress.

Sprinkled with a bit of sugar and hit with a kitchen torch (or placed under a hot broiler), the fruit will develop a caramelized shell, kind of like a crème brûlée that’s somehow nutritious enough to eat for breakfast. I like a raw sugar like demerara or turbinado here, but you can use any granulated sugar you like.

Of course, adding sugar at all is a personal choice — perhaps even a controversial one, given that the average American consumes something like 17 teaspoons of added sugar per day. If you’re trying to cut back, you can use less sugar, or leave it out entirely. You won’t get that crackly shell on top, but you’ll get the caramelized flavors from the fruit’s natural sugars.

I find that including a bit of healthy sweetness in my day makes it easier for me to skip the ultraprocessed stuff when I encounter it. And because of the fiber in the fruit and the fat and protein from the yogurt, I know I won’t be riding the blood-sugar roller coaster for the rest of the day. (For more of the latest research on sugar and your health, see “12 Common Questions About Sugar and Your Health — Answered.”)

If you don’t own a kitchen torch, a preheated broiler is a fine stand-in. But my little butane torch has quickly become one of my favorite kitchen gadgets: It melts cheese, it crisps gratin, it even roasts tomatoes and peppers from the garden when it’s too hot outside to turn on the oven.

Beyond that, I find that cooking with fire power is just a lot of fun. Maybe you’ll think so too.

Before I learned to brûlée it, I mostly knew grapefruit as a low-calorie fad-diet cornerstone. This recipe, for me, is grapefruit rebranded — not as a weight-loss tool but a dose of vitamins when I’m feeling run-down, something bright and bracing to bear me through January.

When the mornings are dark and cold, the promise of a tart, zesty grapefruit is enough to pull me out of bed. Getting to light it on fire is just a bonus.