Lemon Season - A few recipes and ideas about what to do with all the delicious lemons just hanging there waiting to be picked

Lemons I

I posted on Facebook and Instagram earlier this week that I’d soon be putting lemon recipes up, lemons are so good right now, in early March. However, before I start posting actual lemon recipes, and assuming people will be working with only the zest and juice of the fruit, I have some really good tips to share first. They to help the get most out of each piece of fruit. Naturally, before starting, each lemon should be washed well and dried to get rid of wax and pollutants.

Zesting

To maximise the yield of zest from each lemon, a “box grater” will be needed. You’ll see one in the next picture.

Cut off the top and tail off each lemon so that the flesh, inside is just exposed, more on this later

Next grip the lemon, now shaped like a barrel, between your thumb and second finger, then rasp it up and down on the grater’s fine cutter*, at a slight angle and turning a little with each downward stroke, until the zest is removed from about a half of the barrel of the lemon, then turn the lemon and repeat. Avoid rasping yourself and into the white flesh below the yellow skin, it hurts and the pith tastes very bitter!

I tend to find it most convenient to collect the shards of zest on a plate, rather than a bowl or directly into a pan.

Use immediately, before the lemon oil in the zest begins to evaporate.

It will now be obvious why I said to remove the tops and tails of the lemon. This way, it makes it easy to rasp the entire fruit and collect the zest from the whole lemon without scuffing up the knobbly bits at each end.

*Not the so-called nutmeg grater, it cuts much too fine.

Juicing

The second reason for cutting the tops and tails off the lemon is to enable the “crown” of the juicer to penetrate all the way into the flesh of the lemon and to poke through the top of the fruit whilst it is being squeezed, as you'll see in the picture. If the tops and tails are left on, the crown of the juicer is unable to reach that last little bit of flesh and juice at the pointed ends of the fruit.