Preserved Lemons

Preserved lemons are the perfect sweet-savory-and-acidic topping to just about any dish, and a great way to use up extra lemons.

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One of our favorite restaurants in the city, Quality Italian, makes a really incredible Caesar salad. And after a recent brunch there where we ordered not one but two Caesars to share (along with a bunch of other pastas), I decided that I didn’t want to limit myself to eating this salad the few times a year that we go to Quality Italian, I wanted to make this salad at home. I already have a really great recipe for Caesar dressing (which I’ll post soon), but there is one thing that sets Quality Italian’s Caesar a step above the rest: the addition of preserved lemons. So I decided to try my hand at making preserved lemons, and not only are they incredibly simple to make, but they are an amazing addition to so many dishes.

The preserved lemons in the Caesar salad at Quality Italian add an incredible boost of flavor to an otherwise classic dish. They are all at once sweet and salty and super acidic, and when you get a bite of one along with the rest of the salad it truly is a perfect bite of food. But now that I have my own jar of preserved lemons in the fridge, I’m looking forward to using them in all sorts of different ways, from bright pastas (like this lemon asparagus pasta) to pizzas (like this lemon and pesto pizza) to topping chicken or meat dishes (like these chicken cutlets with orange thyme sauce). They bring and unexpected yet perfect burst of flavor to just about anything.

THE KEY TO PRESERVES

Preserves work by using either salt or sugar (or in the case of these preserved lemons, both) along with acid to draw the water our of fruit and vegetables, therefor making them less likely to grown bacteria. I’ve made some kind of preserves on this blog before; my homemade refrigerator pickles and fig jam for these homemade fig bars. In both cases, I chose not to go through the canning process to make my preserves shelf-stable, because I knew I was going to use them relatively quickly, and they last for a few weeks to month in the fridge even without canning. The great thing about these preserved lemons is that they last a really long time in the fridge, six months to a year, but if you wanted them to last even longer or be shelf-stable, you could can them properly as well.

SAVORY OR SWEET… OR BOTH

Most preserved lemon recipes you find use either salt or sugar to preserve the lemons. But I decided to use both, because I wanted my preserved lemons to be both savory and sweet so that they could work with any number of different dishes. I love using them on savory dishes because they add a pop of sweetness for balance, and using them on sweet dishes does the same with a pop of savory. But if you wanted your preserved lemons to have just one of these flavors, you could simply use double the amount of salt or sugar (1+1/4 cups of either) instead of using both.

But I really urge you to try the recipe using both. You know I love a sweet-and-savory balance in just about any dish I make, and if you don’t love that already, you’re bound to love it after you try these preserved lemons.