Preserved lemons are useful in all kinds of recipes and are easy to make.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Kitchen & Craft | 2015-04-14 04:21:00 |  157,530 Views |
AMAZING PRESERVED LEMONS | Recipe
Serious Eats / Clara Inés Schuhmacher
Fresh lemons are a workhorse in my kitchen finding their way into everything from ice cream and pies to bitters and homemade cheese to my favorite household cleaner. In fact I thought I had pretty much exhausted my uses for lemons until one fall afternoon in 2006 when I went to lunch with a friend at the then-new-to-me Café Mogador in New York City’s East Village. She deliberately ordered matching chicken tagines for us without even looking at the menu. The dish was unlike anything I had ever tasted: intensely lemony with a depth I couldn’t place. It was so much more than the lemon chicken it appeared to be on the plate. I later learned that the unique flavor came from preserved lemons which added an irresistible complexity to an otherwise plain chicken.
Boston chef Ana Sortun has a name for it: lemon umami. “Preserved lemons add a fermented quality that a regular lemon wouldn’t have” she says. Sortun who first encountered preserved lemons while working for Tunisian-born chef Moncef Meddeb 22 years ago was so taken with the condiment and Eastern Mediterranean cuisine in general that she opened her own restaurant Oleana to honor the cuisine. Chef Michael Solomonov best known for his famed Philadelphia restaurant Zahav agrees: “Sometimes squeezing a lemon on a dish just isn’t enough and that’s where preserved lemons come in. They add a big punch of flavor: heavy citrus heavy floral notes from the oils in the peel and ultimately heavy umami. It’s that little something in the background of a dish that piques your curiosity.”
