Tangy and rich curd makes a fabulously delicious spread on your bread or an extraordinarily flavorful ingredient in your desserts. Curd is also beneficial if you make it without sugar and with grass-fed butter. This Sugar-Free Pink Grapefruit Curd is a fantastic twist and an excellent addition to your collection of keto curd recipes. It has a beautiful, warm color, tongue-tickling tanginess, and a rich taste of butter. To be enjoyed liberally!
How to make this Sugar-Free Pink Grapefruit Curd
Making this 5-ingredient sweet keto spread is easy: just combine all ingredients in a saucepan, heat over very low heat all the time whisking, until the mixture is thick, and you’ll see the first bubbles of boiling. Then, let cool and dig in!
However, there are a couple of things to consider to ensure the perfect result. First of all, use very low heat to guarantee the smoothest consistency. Another thing to guarantee the smoothest consistency is to remove the saucepan from heat immediately when you see the first bubbles, i.e. when the mixture starts boiling. If you let the mixture cook, it might become lumpy.
If, in an unfortunate case, you’ll end up with a lumpy curd, press it through a fine-mesh sieve to remove the lumps. Voilà! Now you’ve got a fantastically velvety curd.
That’s it! As you’ll see, this Sugar-Free Pink Grapefruit Curd is super easy to make, so let’s take a look at how to make it.
First, take a couple of organic pink grapefruit and squeeze the juice from them. (Make sure to use organic fruit to avoid pesticides and herbicides.)
Take 1/2 cup (120 ml) of juice.
Add the pink grapefruit juice to a thick-bottomed saucepan.
Add also 3 organic free-range eggs…
…1/2 cup (120 ml; or to taste) powdered erythritol…
…1 stick (4 oz = 115 g) unsalted butter (again, go for organic and grass-fed butter if you can)…
…and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract.
Heat over very low heat, all the time mixing…
…mixing…
…until the mixture is thick and it’s about to start boiling. When you see the first bubbles, remove the saucepan immediately from heat.
Let cool down first to room temperature, then refrigerate.
Ready!
Enjoy as a spread, filling, or topping.
Yum!
How I came up with this easy keto curd recipe
I’m an avid lover of sugar-free curd. Tangy, butter-based curd is a fantastic way to add both flavor and healthy fats to your diet. I’ve made many keto curd recipes, the earliest one (this Keto Lemon Curd recipe) almost 10 years ago. Before that, I was a bit hesitant to make curd because they usually require egg yolks, i.e., you need to separate the eggs, and the curd might get lumpy if cooked too long. Moreover, the curd recipes usually require some complicated maneuvers, and as you know, I’m all about anything but complicated.
So, about 10 years ago, I decided to develop an easy Keto Lemon Curd recipe. I was too lazy (or busy; you decide) to separate eggs, so I simply did a simple experiment and combined whole eggs with other needed ingredients in a saucepan, cooked over low heat all the time whisking until the mixture had thickened and it had reached the boiling point. So, this method was exactly how you prepare, for example, vanilla sauce (except curd involves an ample amount of butter. Mmmm… butter…)
To my big surprise, the curd turned out perfect: thick, smooth, and velvety. Also, the taste was both rich and mouthwateringly tangy. Awesome!
Encouraged by the huge success of that simple recipe, I did several other keto curd experiments and ended up with more recipes.
Check out my other keto curd recipes:
In addition, I developed a Triple Citrus Curd recipe for my newsletter I was publishing some years ago. Oh boy, how perfect fireworks of flavors it was! For Ketokamu followers, I developed a dairy-free lime curd recipe.
However, I didn’t stop there. There is something fascinating about pink grapefruit. Its beautiful, bright red-orange color of the flesh is very inviting, and its tangy flavor is mouthwateringly tempting. The taste is not that aggressively acidic like regular yellow grapefruit, just palatably tart.
Usually, keto doesn’t allow fruit — other than extremely low in carbs, like avocados and lemons — but there are ways to include some fruits (or natural fruit flavors) into your keto diet.
Last fall, I got the idea of keto curd made from pink grapefruit. Yes, pink grapefruit has more carbs than lemon, but as you use it only a little, it doesn’t break your carb bank. And seriously, I sometimes eat half of a grapefruit (gasp!) because my active lifestyle and health allow it. And let’s remember that pink grapefruit still has about half of the net carbs of blueberries. Yes, you see blueberries used in keto recipes much more often than pink grapefruit.
So, with a clear picture of beautifully pink and deliciously tangy pink grapefruit curd in my mind, it was finally about time to start getting my hands dirty with the actual recipe. I decided to use blatantly my ten-year-old simple lemon curd recipe as a base, although I wanted to make some tweaks to it. For example, instead of erythritol crystals, I opted for powdered erythritol that dissolves so much better in cold desserts and doesn’t crystallize nastily like erythritol crystals tend to do.
Moreover, I decided to use large eggs instead of extra-large eggs. At the time of developing the Keto Lemon Curd recipe 10 years ago, extra-large organic eggs were cheaper than large organic eggs, so I used extra-large eggs in my lemon curd recipe. However, since large eggs are the standard in recipes, I chose large eggs for my Sugar-Free Pink Grapefruit Curd recipe.
I also decided to swap vanilla stevia to vanilla extract. Like lemon curd, I thought pink grapefruit curd also benefits from some vanilla flavor, so I certainly wanted to add vanilla in one form or another. Vanilla extract was the easiest way. Vanilla powder would have simply ruined the beautiful color and make the curd look dirty.
The old Keto Lemon Curd recipe used 3.5 oz (100 g) butter, so to make it easier for my American readers, I opted for 1 stick (4 oz = 115 g) unsalted butter for this Sugar-Free Pink Grapefruit Curd recipe.
I have to confess that I didn’t do any experiments with this recipe because I was so sure the recipe works, so I just shot the photos and the videos while preparing the recipe for the first time. I have to admit experience (and especially experience in making keto curd!) helps in recipe development.
The recipe turned out as fabulous as I had hoped — except the color wasn’t beautifully pink but just warm yellow with a faint orangish note. That actually didn’t matter as the taste and the looks were otherwise perfect. Wonderful! I was enjoying every mouthful of this tart treat with great pleasure.
Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:
5-Ingredient Sugar-Free Pink Grapefruit Curd
Tangy and rich curd makes a fabulously delicious spread on your bread or an extraordinarily flavorful ingredient in your desserts. Curd is also beneficial if you make it without sugar and with grass-fed butter. This Sugar-Free Pink Grapefruit Curd is a fantastic twist and an excellent addition to your collection of keto curd recipes. It has a beautiful, warm color, tongue-tickling tanginess, and a rich taste of butter. To be enjoyed liberally!
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup = 120 ml freshly squeezed juice from organic pink grapefruit
- 3 organic free-range eggs
- 1/2 cup = 120 ml powdered erythritol
- 1 stick = 4 oz = 115 g unsalted grass-fed butter
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
1. Place all ingredients into a thick-bottomed saucepan. Heat over low heat, whisking all the time, until the mixture is thick, and you'll see the first bubbles of boiling. However, don't let boil longer. Remove immediately from the heat.
2. Let cool until room temperature, then refrigerate.
3. Store in the fridge in an airtight container for up to one week.
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| Nutrition information | In total | Per 1/4 cup (60 ml) |
| Protein | 23.2 g | 3.1 g |
| Fat | 110.4 g | 14.7 g |
| Net carbs | 12.0 g | 1.6 g |
| kcal | 1110 kcal | 148 kcal |
Tips for variations
There are naturally many ways to jazz up this simple recipe. Pink grapefruit is a perfect match with warm spices like cardamom, star anise, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, mint, and ginger.
If you want to make this curd completely dairy-free, replace the butter with half coconut manna and half cacao butter.
Feel free to replace part of the pink grapefruit juice with another citrus juice — or swap the pink grapefruit juice to regular grapefruit juice. You might want to adjust the sweetness to your liking, as regular grapefruit is sourer than pink grapefruit.
For an even more profound citrus flavor, add one or two drops (not more!) food-grade essential oil (grapefruit, orange, or lemon) to the ready curd as the essential oils don’t stand heating.
Powdered erythritol is a perfect sweetener for this keto curd, however, feel free to use another calorie-free and carb-free natural sweetener that dissolves well. You can use, for example, stevia, monk fruit (luo han guo), or allulose. Try flavored stevias for an exciting twist.
General prattling
Happy New Year! Hope you have had a great start for the year 2022. We celebrated the New Year at home with fireworks and good food. I had prepared some finger food but also a huge pastry filled with ground beef.
I also made a few recipes for our Finnish keto baking group using our keto baking mix, for example, Pigs in a Blanket, Keto Pizza Cake, and Crispy Keto Crackers. The cracker recipe was inspired by my gingerbread cookie recipe (!). All recipes were excellent for the New Year’s celebrations. The crackers were a perfect vehicle for different cheeses.
I wish you joy, health, happiness, and lots of bright days to the year 2022!
I made this and it’s too runny after refrigerating what can I do to save it ?
Add an egg, heat it carefully while all the time whisking and chill. You can also add a few tablespoons of butter (naturally with the egg before heating) to ensure it’s not runny. Hope this helps!
Happy New Year, Elviira!! When I got your email, I thought I was not interested in grapefruit curd, but after reading the recipe… well, I have saved it, because it sounds too good to ignore. Making it will have to wait until I finish the jar of lemon curd I have in the freezer. I love that I can eat low carb and still have curd in my life. Thank you for that.
Happy New Year, Susan! So great to hear pink grapefruit in this form sounds appealing to you. I just ate some of this curd with manchego cheese and the combination was divine!
Ooh! Manchego!! One of my very favorite cheeses. Now you really have me hooked. I will make a note to try that.
Awesome!!