Preserves "Recipe": Preserved Lemons

[aquaprofunda]

Firstly, OM NOM NOM.

Preserved lemons are one of my favourite preserves. When I ask people if they like them, most of them have no idea what they are or what to do with them. I always tell them to use them like a spice or a seasoning - to add amazing flavour to a dish, that's more in the "spice" realm than fresh lemon zest/juice flavouring would be. I like to add preserved lemon to any 'moroccan'-style dish I'm doing (eg with loads of garlic, tomatoes, and chickpeas), to home-made hummous, to cous cous salads (with roasted capsicum and moar chickpeas and olives and parsley and tomato).

Basically, yum. A couple of months ago I jarred up a huge amount of lemons and put them in the back of the cupboard; this morning I transferred them to smaller jars to give to friends. the smell was amazing.

OK, so, enough gushing. Here's how you do it:

Ingredients

• Lemons with some nice skins. You get better flavour out of nicely ripe lemons - rich gold skins instead of pale yellow. You'll probably at least a couple per jar, depending on your jar size.


• Lemons for juice. Don't necessarily have to have nice skins. Probably almost an equal quantity of these as of the ones you'll be using the skins of.


• Salt. Lots of salt. As in, buy a kilo bag of basic cooking/household salt.

Equipment

• Jars! Wide jars with wide mouths will serve you best. Big jars are good for the preserving stage, you can always re-jar them to smaller ones once they're nice and done. Your jars should be clean, preferably sterilised, and dry


• A juice squeezer to squeeze your juicing lemons.


• Chopping board/knife to cut up lemons.


• Big bowl to put chopped lemons in (optional, good if you're doing preserving in a team!)


• Jug for lemon juice.


• Disposable latex gloves so you don't kill your cuticles with all the lemon juice and salt.

Method

1. First, set yourself up at a workbench. Have all your jars open and on hand. Pour a quantity of salt into a largish bowl (you'll be taking handfuls of it). Have that within reach along with your bowl for lemon wedges and jug for juice.


2. Wash all your nice-skinned lemons, and chop them into wedges. Squeeze all your juicing lemons and pour the juice into the jug (try and keep the pulp and seeds out.


3. Get your jar. Put a handful of salt into the bottom, then a layer of lemon wedges, making sure to press them firmly in - you want to have as little empty space in the jar as possible. Put another layer of salt over the top, and another round of wedges. Keep repeating this - think of the jar as a jigsaw puzzle and the lemon wedges as the pieces. you want to cram as much in, with a generous amount of salt between them and filling in the gaps.


4. When you've filled the jar up to the top, carefully pour lemon juice in with the plan of filling all air pockets with juice. You might have to carefully jiggle the jar around a bit and maybe use a chopstick or something to poke and lever lemons to allow the juice to flow.


5. Once it's full to the brim, wipe the salt & juice off around the jar rim and put the jar lid on tightly.


6. Put full jars in a dark cupboard for 6-8 weeks. You might want to turn them upside down halfway through as there's likely to be some airpockets regardless, and that gets the juice covering all lemons at one point or another. After 6-8 weeks, they're ready to eat!

How to prepare for eating

1. Take a single wedge - or less, depending on how much you want - from the jar. Rinse carefully under running water, washing off the salt. Use your thumb to scrape off the lemon flesh/pulp so that only the peel is left. It shouldn't be too hard.


2. Unless it's going in the food processor, you'll probably want to chop the peel into small pieces before putting them into your food. As with spices like garlic and ginger, the later you put it in the food before eating, the stronger the flavour will be. It's perfectly fine to eat "raw", i.e. in salads and so forth.

Like I said: OM NOM NOM!