(by Kat.)
Last February, we went to a party where another of the guests brought delicious hummus made with sun-dried tomatoes and chopped preserved lemons. It tasted amazing and answered a question that I had asked myself earlier that morning—”What the hell am I going to do with this gigantic stack of Meyer lemons that I just purchased on impulse from the produce stand?”
And so, it was time for another of my periodic adventures into the wilderness of home-preserved foods. I don’t do this too often, having heard too much from my grandma about the Dread Botulinium Toxin and other assorted fatal maladies. But pickled lemons seemed surmountable, even easy. Here’s the recipe I followed:
- Roll the lemons on the table to burst the little lemon vesicles and release their juice.
- Quarter the lemons, leaving them attached near the base.
- Use a citrus reamer to squeeze the juice into a sterilized jar. I put about 10 lemons into a quart jar.
- Dissolve 1/2 cup of salt into the juice. (I misread the recipe and added basically a fuckload more salt).
- Add the lemons to the jar. If the juice doesn’t cover the lemons, use more fresh-squeezed lemon juice to cover. Leave at least 1/2 inch of space at the top of the jar. (If you, like me, add too much salt, the lemons will not sink in the juice. The juice has to cover the lemons, though. My solution was to panic and call my friend Dan, who is the sort of person who knows what to do in such a crisis. His solution was to find a little bowl or some other weight, sterilize it, and put it on top of the lemons to weigh them down.)
- Cap the jar and put it somewhere fairly warm in your kitchen. Turn it over and give it a shake every day to redistribute the salted juice. The lemons will be ready in a month.
To use a lemon, take it out using a clean wooden implement (your hands are too filthy to put into your nice clean preserved lemon container!) and rinse it off to get some of the salt out. Also, a sort of white gunk tends to adhere to the lemons — I think it’s just crystallized salt, and it’s a normal part of the lemon-preserving process (i.e. it is not some deadly contaminant) — but it should be washed off anyway. Both the rind and the pulp are edible, but I prefer to only use the rind in stuff like salads and dips, for aesthetic reasons. (If I’m cooking with the lemons, I use rind and pulp.) The lemons keep for up to a year, and the pickling liquid can be re-used if you want, or you can use it in things like vinaigrettes.
A slightly later salad… with strawberries!So, my inaugural batch of lemons is now ready for consumption. I plucked one out of the jar, chopped the rind into little rectangles, and put it into a salad with goat cheese, spinach, red onion, olive oil, and a little of the pickling juice. It was delicious. The lemons turned silky-smooth in texture and their flavor takes on a pickled quality (because, after all, that’s what you did to them). Absolutely delicious.
I have further plans for these lemons:
- Blatant theft of the sun-dried tomato and preserved lemon hummus idea
- Tagines and other Moroccan dishes, of course
- Sauteed with asparagus
- Maybe make some kind of spring roll or rice-paper wrap, with preserved lemons, shrimp, and maybe some Thai basil?
Next time, I think I might try this recipe—the additional spices look really delicious, although I worry that including them might make the lemons themselves a little less versatile than the straight-up lemon and salt recipe.
