How to cook with Meyer lemons
My
post yesterday about care
of your Meyer lemon tree got long, so I didn't have
room to fit in what I've learned about cooking with the fruits.
Since Meyer lemons are actually a hybrid between a true lemon and an
orange, their flesh is a bit sweeter than the lemons you'd buy in the
store --- just sweet enough that sour-lovers like me can eat them
raw. When cooking with Meyer lemons, I tend to lower the amount
of sugar in the recipe a bit so that we're not overwhelmed with
sweetness.
I've also noticed that
the zest (grated rind) isn't as tangy as that on a true lemon.
Here I tend to cheat and throw in a bit of extra zest from a
storebought lemon. On the other hand, Martha Stewart will
tell you that the white part of a Meyer lemon isn't bitter, so you can
just cut up the whole lemon and put it in various dishes --- I'll have
to give that a try!
If you want to learn
more about the Meyer lemon, I recommend this
NPR article.
Did you know they've been grown as container plants in China for over a
century?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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