Preserve Your Own Lemons

 

Make your own preserved lemons

Preserved lemons are a great addition to tagines and vegetable dishes, and they take just minutes – plus a few weeks' patience – to make.

The golden glow of preserved lemons will light up your kitchen and your cooking. "Make a jar," Diana Henry writes in Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons, "and you'll soon be addicted to the taste, employing them not just in Moroccan tagines but in a dish of Mediterranean vegetables, with olive oil-roasted potatoes and red onions, in bowls of bulgur wheat, couscous and pulses…" All it takes is 20 minutes of slicing and squeezing, and three or four weeks' patience.

Start by sterilizing a sturdy, easily resealed glass jar – a clip-top Kilner is perfect – for 15 minutes at 140C/275F/gas mark 1. A jar between 500ml and 1 liter in capacity is a good size to begin with. You'll also need coarse salt and what may seem like far too many unwaxed lemons – between six and seven for every half-liter. You will possibly end up with one or two left over, but you may need these for topping up later – and if you can't find a use for a spare lemon you shouldn't be in the kitchen in the first place.

Once the jar is cool enough to handle, or on its way there, wash and dry the fruit, remove any stems, and slice the lemons almost in separate quarters lengthwise, stopping just short of the stem end. The aim is to leave four pieces that are still joined over a centimetre or two.

Working over a bowl, do your best to cram a tablespoon of salt inside each fruit, placing them in the jar as you go, together with any salt that has escaped. Press them down as firmly as you can. Stop just before you reach the top, add the last bit of leftover salt and release as many air bubbles as you can. With luck, all the squeezing will have liberated enough lemon juice to comfortably cover the fruit; if not, add more before sealing the jar.

And that's pretty much all there is to it. Put the jar somewhere cool and dark for at least three weeks, upending it occasionally to redistribute the loose salt, and topping up the juice if the lemons become exposed. Once your peel is soft and ready to use, move the jar to the fridge, where the contents should keep for around a year or more.