Category Archives: Glut-busting

When Life Gives You Lemons – Part 4: lemon pickle [Guest Blogger]

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Today’s Guest Blogger is Ross, from Christchurch, NZ.

Lemon pickle

This one is a bit friskier, with the smoking hot oil making the kitchen smell strongly of mustard for a while – you have been warned!

This made about 1kg of pickle for me (including some excess oil).

  • 8 lemons,
  • 150g salt,
  • 25g fenugreek; 25g mustard powder; 50g chilli powder; 8g turmeric. (I used mild chilli powder from my local Indian supermarket, and the end product still had a bit of a kick; if you prefer it incendiary, then use the hot stuff.)
  • 300ml mustard oil; 1/2 tsp asafoetida (hing); 12g mustard seeds (crushed).

Salted lemonsStart by sterilising a large glass jar – a kilner-type jar like the one pictured is ideal.

Wash the lemons, dry, cut into eighths; you don’t have to remove the pips, but I did.

Put the lemons in the jar. Add the salt and shake it all up well to spread it all over them.

Lemons, after saltingCover; leave in a warm place for 1-2 weeks. (I put it on the windowsill which catches the sun nicely.) The juice leeches out of the lemons; where they’re exposed to the air, the lemon pieces soften and go a dull brown colour.

Mix the fenugreek, mustard powder, chilli powder and turmeric. Add this to the jar and shake it around gently. Re-cover and put it back into the warm for 2-3 days.

With all the spicesTransfer the lemon pieces and spices to a large saucepan.

Heat the mustard oil in a large frying pan. Fry the mustard seeds and asafoetida.

Keep heating the oil until it starts to smoke, then pour it over the lemons. (This is where it gets a bit frisky.)

Mix well. Allow to cool, transfer to a bowl, cover once more and leave in the warm for another week or so.

Lemon pickle

Now it is ready to put into jars; I tried (without huge success) to decant the excess oil. Then you can give some to your friends as presents, or to your enemies as a chemical weapon…

Ross is an expat thirtysomething Brit who went to the Shakey Isles in search of adventure. Works in technology, enjoys creating, has a love-hate relationship with his kitchen.

Warm thanks go out to Ross for these four great blog posts – hopefully he’ll be back with some more antipodean country skills for the blog in the future!  Have a look at Ross’s other lemon glut-busting recipes for lemonade and lemon liqueur, and lemon sorbet (which you’ll be needing, after sampling this pickle, I think!).

I hope you’ve all enjoyed this contribution from a great guest blogger as much as I have!

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When Life Gives You Lemons – Part 3: lemon sorbet [Guest Blogger]

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Lemon TreeToday’s Guest Blogger is Ross, from Christchurch, NZ.

Lemon sorbet

Next up, to cleanse the palate, a simple sorbet. Note that if you have an ice cream maker it’ll make life easier, but it’s not mandatory (I don’t have one).

This recipe uses 8 lemons, and makes about 2.5 cups of sorbet.

  • Make up some simple syrup (see post 1 of this series) with 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar.
  • While it’s cooling, zest most of the lemons. You’re looking for about 2 tsp of zest – the finer, the better – I reckoned I had enough after six lemons.
  • Juice the lemons. You’re looking for about a cup of juice.
  • Mix the juice, zest and cooled syrup. Chill well (I left mine in the fridge for a couple of hours).

Now freeze. If you have an ice cream maker, you’re all set – but I don’t. That’s OK, it just means a bit more effort. The end product is a water ice, not a block of solid ice, so all you have to do is fluff it up a bit as it freezes.

Lemon Sorbet

  • I split the mixture into a couple of clean shallow plastic tubs and put them in the freezer.
  • After a few hours it was semi-solid; I mashed it up with a fork, then put it back in the freezer. Ideally I’d have done this again after a few more hours, but it was late in the evening so I left it overnight. This was maybe a bit too long as it was nearly solid so was a lot of work! (You could probably use a blender instead, but I don’t have one.)
  • Then put it back in the freezer. After 12-24 hours it’s frozen enough to serve.

Ross is an expat thirtysomething Brit who went to the Shakey Isles in search of adventure. Works in technology, enjoys creating, has a love-hate relationship with his kitchen.

Have a look at Ross’s other lemon glut-busting recipes for lemonade and lemon liqueur.  Coming up soon, lemon pickle.  Watch this space!

Read more from the Country Skills blog >>

When Life Gives You Lemons – Part 2: lemon liqueur, or ‘limoncello’ [Guest Blogger]

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Today’s Guest Blogger is Ross, from Christchurch, NZ.

Lemon Liqueur

I did the first part of this at the same time as I made up some lemonade. This was a small test batch but will scale up directly.

IngredientsIngredients –

  • A half bottle of vodka (375ml) – not flavoured, you want something as pure and tasteless as you can find.
  •  8 lemons (zest only). Go for lemons with thick peels if you can, to maximise the amount of zest.

Sterilise a large sealable jar. This is the same as for making jam – a careful clean, rinse well, then dry in a slow oven.

Scrub and dry the lemons, make sure you’ve removed any wax. Now zest them; be very careful not to take any pith or you will spoil the result.

While the jar was cooling, I juiced the lemons to make the lemonade.

Lemon liqueur, infusingPut the zest into the jar and add the vodka. Make sure all the zest is covered, then seal it up and stash in a cool dark place for a while. I found a number of different recipes suggesting anything from 2 to 45 days; I left it for two weeks.

… time passes …

Make sure your bottles are clean and dry. You’ll end up with slightly more by volume than just the vodka.

Prepare a simple sugar syrup, and let it cool.

The amount of syrup you need is whatever will dilute your starting liquid to the desired strength (traditional limoncello is 30-32% ABV). In my case (375ml of 37.5% ABV vodka) this calls for 80ml of syrup.

Combine the infused alcohol with the syrup. Stir well. Optionally, say some recipes, let it rest for a few more weeks (I didn’t).

Filtering set-upNow filter carefully; for best results filter more than once. I started out with a sieve, then switched to coffee filters. I filtered it four times, which might be excessive; I set up a little production line (pictured). The filtering was slow, and the setup easy to knock over; I found myself longing for some clamp-stands like I used in chemistry class in high school. Unsurprisingly, the filters clogged quite readily; I got through several of them.

Bottle directly from the last filtration; the liqueur should be clear but coloured. At this point the product is very sweet and sharp. Let it mature in the bottle for at least a week; both the sharpness and the cloying sweetness melt away. Serve cold (direct from the fridge, or even the freezer). It’s dynamite-strong; take care!

Next steps?

This wasn’t real limoncello; apparently the genuine stuff is made with grain alcohol which pulls more flavour out of the lemon. (Grain alcohol as in 95% ABV – yes, almost pure ethanol – 190 proof in old money. It’s difficult to find on the shelves, but here in New Zealand it’s legal to distill spirits for personal use. There might be another blog post in here along those lines, but that’s a project for another day…)

Ross is an expat thirtysomething Brit who went to the Shakey Isles in search of adventure. Works in technology, enjoys creating, has a love-hate relationship with his kitchen.

Coming soon, more lemon glut-busting recipes from Ross – lemon sorbet, and lemon pickle.  Watch this space!

Read more from the Country Skills blog >>

When Life Gives You Lemons – Part 1: Lemonade! [Guest Blogger]

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Today’s Guest Blogger is Ross, from Christchurch, NZ.

Lemon TreeWhat to do when life gives you lemons?

We have a lemon tree. Consequently, we have a lot of lemons. It’s just turning to spring here in New Zealand as I am starting to write this, it’s our first spring in this house, and we have a crop ready to harvest.

As a long time reader of the Country Skills Blog I went fishing for suggestions. There is plenty of marmalade on here, which I must get round to trying out sometime, and everybody has heard of traditional old-style lemonade, but what other interesting things can we do with them…?

Studying some recipes I found recipes for a lemon liqueur not entirely unlike limoncello, which use only the zest of the lemon, whereas lemonade uses only the juice. A perfect combination for the first experiments!

Simple Sugar Syrup

This comes up in a few of these recipes, so I’ll describe it once.

Take roughly equal volumes of sugar and water. Mix and heat in a small pan; boil gently until the sugar has dissolved leaving you with a clear syrup. You usually want to leave it to cool before you do anything else with it; if not, take care – it’s like napalm.

Fresh Homemade Lemonade

Lemonade 1Ingredients:

  • Lemons (juice only),
  • sugar,
  • (optional) fresh mint to garnish.

120ml of lemon juice + 1/2 cup sugar makes about 650ml lemonade.

Juice however many lemons. I got about 120ml from the eight lemons I used for my test batch of limoncello; I could have probably got some more from them if I had tried harder.

Lemon JuiceMake up some simple syrup following directions above. I used the same volumes of water and of sugar as I had lemon juice – near enough 1/2 measuring cup of each.

Let the syrup cool, then transfer to a jug. Add the lemon juice, then more water to dilute: three times as much water as you put into the syrup, so I used 1 1/2 cups. Chill well before serving. If you have any fresh mint to hand (I didn’t), it would make an excellent garnish.

Ross is an expat thirtysomething Brit who went to the Shakey Isles in search of adventure. Works in technology, enjoys creating, has a love-hate relationship with his kitchen.

Coming up soon, more lemon glut-busting recipes from Ross – lemon liqueur, sorbet, and lemon pickle.  Watch this space!

Read more from the Country Skills blog >>