Fermentation Atlas · Side
Preserved Lemons
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, a warm current of chile.
Ingredients
- 8 unwaxed lemons, thin skinned
- 200g coarse sea salt
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 tsp black peppercorns
- Juice of 4 further lemons, as needed
The skills inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cut each lemon in quarters from the top, stopping 1cm short of the base so it stays hinged.
- Pack salt into every cut surface, close the fruit, and press into a sterilised jar, layering bay and peppercorns.
- Press down hard. The lemons should release enough juice to cover; top up with fresh juice if not.
- Seal and leave a month at room temperature, turning the jar occasionally. Refrigerate after opening.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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