Native to China and northeastern India, mandarins are one of five original types of citrus (along with pummelos, citrons, kumquats and papedas) from which all others, like oranges and grapefruit, are derived. To get the best of the mandarin boom, it helps to understand the fruit’s history, varieties and seasons. Shippers and merchants often store them far past their peak, and the seeds in traditional varieties can put off consumers. At their finest, they are juicy, sweet-tart and intensely aromatic, but many store-bought specimens are dry and bland. The most complex and flavorful of citrus, they are correspondingly difficult to grow, as demanding as wine grapes in their requirements for terroir and horticultural prowess. Mandarins may seem an unlikely candidate for a marquee fruit. The country’s consumption of mandarins has doubled, to five pounds a year for every American, while orange sales have declined. In the process, thanks to new offerings and deft marketing, mandarins - popularly known as tangerines - have become a fixture in the American fruit bowl. The state now harvests 92 percent of the nation’s mandarin crop, while Florida, troubled by citrus greening disease and obsolete varieties with seeds, has had its share drop to 8 percent, from 66 percent. Since that expansion started in the late 1990s, California’s mandarin plantings have increased 10-fold, to 50,000 acres from 5,000.

Once home to cotton fields, this is now the epicenter of an epic agricultural boom that has industrialized a noble fruit and turned it into a rising star. Along the Maricopa Highway at the southwestern end of the San Joaquin Valley, rimmed by hardscrabble hills and bobbing oil pumps, stretch miles of lush green groves bearing fluorescent mandarin oranges.

Cuties seedless california mandarins