I’m so impressed with this pickling :-)

My child wants pickled carrots so I must actually closely read all that LapLap has posted here because I’ve already mentioned this thread to my family :-)

Now I’ve seen a cute fermenting video for Tabasco sauce - it’s a FB video via Eater. Impressive. 700,000 daily bottles after the 3-year fermentation and a handful of hours with vinegar.

https://fb.watch/3fxSchNLaQ/

Preserved lemons
 

Salted, not fermented. These will sit for 3-4 weeks then supposedly last forever in the fridge.


https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...b316366b0.jpeg

Any technique or recipe used for this? Would like to try this too, would an addition of 2% of weight in salt do it?
Also, what do you have in mind to use the lemons with?


Yesterday I shredded and combined 4 white cabbages from Lidl with 1 green pointed organic cabbage, 2 organic onions and some garlic as well as 2% salt to make up 5kg (roughly 10 pounds) sauerkraut - ready in March. Already burping away in the water lock pot, which is very reassuring. The 5 cabbage stems/cores I sliced, combined with carrot slices, shredded ginger, kombu seaweed and 2% salt to make Japanese style tsukemono - ready in about 3-4 days. Yielded over 300g (half a pound), not bad for an ingredient that is usually discarded.

I found loads of recipes and can’t remember which one I used after all that reading. I think it was Alton Brown’s. 40 grams of salt over approximately 4 lemons cut in eighths. The container is 16 ounces. Layers of lemons and salt. Squeeze them a bit to insure juice goes all the way to the top. Shake a couple times a week. Some recipes called for addition of bay leaf and peppercorns.

I have a Mediterranean cookbook with multiple recipes that call for them. I plan to make a Moroccan roast chicken with preserved lemons and olives. Perfect candidate for clay pot cooking, I think. I will have to use a Dutch oven since I have no clay pot. I will post the recipe when I have time.

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...631ddb7e8.jpeg

plus a bonus recipe on the opposite page.

Thank you!
I know your book says these are frequently used in Mediterranean cooking, but I can assure you that there are very long parts of the Mediterranean coastline where preserved lemons are completely unknown except as a “foreign” ingredient. I’ve never come across them in any Spanish dishes.
What appeals to me is the chance to regularly use a little lemon without having to slice open an entire fruit each time, I can think of more Japanese foods where I’d use it than Mediterranean ones. Am more than open to preserved lemons as an ingredient but haven’t come close to grasping their potential.
(And apart from a VERY specific small area in Andalucía which I’m told uses culantro, cilantro/coriander is a herb you won’t find in traditional Spanish foods either)

The recipe does give an option of fresh as well, but that may alter the flavor of the dish.

Something, not apparent on the page, made me think it was a North African dish, possibly Moroccan. Maybe it was the chapter heading or chapter intro. But I may have dreamed that.

Thanks to your post, I’ve started a batch of salted lemons (roughly 6% in salt, and cut them so that they could sit in in their own juice without a brine). We loved the jam from the “unsuccessful” blueberry ferment and as I came across some heavily discounted blueberries and am repeating the experiment.
https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...4a922058b.jpeg

(The very large crocks have a “white” sauerkraut and another kind with red cabbages mixed with a leftover white cabbage from the other batch)

It has only been a week since I prepared ours, but I pulled one out yesterday to include in a roast chicken marinade and realised that a week in the salt has already made the rind more edible than before, loved the extra octave it brought to the roast.

Am posting now to say thank you as yesterday’s foray into the lemon pot signalled that I could use some to combine with fresh lemon juice and add to some pancakes (it’s Pancake Day in the U.K. today). What a hit! The most intensely lemony pancakes we’ve ever had. Yum!

We were discussing the taste and how great that they aren’t anything like any of the commercial preserved lemons we’ve ever tried, which smell and taste like cleaning products. And no excessive bitterness.

I guess it’s time to incorporate them in a meal. I have to be careful the next 6 weeks as Mrs BV faithfully observes Lent. What do you think about serving them with seafood?

That’s the beauty of them being in pieces rather than kept slit but whole as in other recipes, just dig up a slice, maybe rinse it, then chop it finely. You can use it instead of (or in addition to) lemon juice and it will be more intense. A little goes a long way and I see them as a perfect condiment for Lent - particularly as no part of the pickled version is thrown away.
It might be that the salting/fermentation brings out deeper flavours in the next week or two, but our batch is already delightful. My husband is really enjoying just seeing the jar of cheerful yellow in the kitchen, that he can happily eat the rind without having to discard it makes them even more attractive.

Faced with a 2.5 pound kohlrabi from my CSA box, I am currently waiting for brine to cool for my first fermenting project, a vegan kohlrabi kimchi. Let’s see how this goes....

Kohlrabi will be sent to us quite soon in our vegetable box subscription, so I am VERY interested in learning how yours turn out.

I broke open one of our big 5 litre pickling pots last night - always nerve racking, but not a speck of surface mould in there, phew! - and gave this white/green cabbage ferment its initial taste test. This was the first time I’d included grated ginger along with some onion. It was delicious, hard to explain what ginger brought to the party as the result wasn’t quite what I’d expected. MrLapLap again brought up preserved rakkyo as a comparison. This sauerkraut has turned out to be the perfect “hybrid” for him, it’s a lovely, refreshing cabbage sauerkraut but with a tsukemono “edge” which goes particularly well with rice. He had beef, pumpkin and renkon curry last night as well as plain white rice and my first attempt at Doria, he ate the sauerkraut with everything. I found it went very well with the curry.

I’m still not sure what would happen if I allow it to continue to ferment (has only been about 18 days), so I stuffed about 1.5kgs into jars for the fridge and re-set the rest of the sauerkraut in the water seal crock and will give it another try at some point this weekend. Lesson learned so far is that ginger doesn’t make sauerkraut overly “gingery”, flavour becomes more interesting, elegant even. Definitely worth trying!

And the lemon is developing exquisitely. Will keep an eye on it keenly from now as it is reaching somewhere beautiful but the perfume might “turn” too far if I don’t put it in the fridge at the right point. Beyond my expectations, nothing like the commercial stuff I’ve had.

Today’s discovery is that the ultra-aromatic preserved lemon juice/brine is the most perfect way to add a citrus taste to Ponzu
I just put together my own ponzu with some dashi concentrate as the main base, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t add some verve and glamour to a mediocre store bought ponzu.

This revelation just by itself means we’ll be keeping preserved lemons for most of the year. Thank you BamaVol !