When life gives you lemons - part 3

I took a break from lemon operations on Friday and caught up with some emails and other admin. In the evening though I tried out a lemon chicken recipe that I found on Pinterest for dinner. It was certainly fun to make, and smelled heavenly as I grilled the lemons in the skillet. As for eating though, I was a little less enthused. I guess I'm not really a savoury lemon person – too sour for my taste. But, it was a nice change from my usual dinners all the same.

A picker getting stuck in

Saturday brought with it sunny weather and I had two people come over to pick lemons and so I made my first small change from my lemon harvest – $3 a bag. At last the mass of lemons is starting to reduce, though the tree is still pretty full, sigh. I can't even give them away! It seems everyone has a lemon surplus around here.

Once my lemon pickers had been, my first project of the day was to make lemon vinegar. I had quite a lot of fruit from Wednesday's batch had tears in the skin where they had detached from tree and needed to be used fast. So after I washed them, I chopped them into chunks and packed them into glass jars which I then filled with white vinegar. I'll leave them like that for two weeks or so to allow the vinegar to infuse with the lemon. After that I'll strain the mixture, removing the fruit, pips etc and bottle the liquid. It ought to be good in salads and if it flops it can be used as a eco-friendly cleaner, lol.

Lemon vinegar in the making

I spent the rest of the day washing, juicing and zesting the rest of Wednesday's lemons. I ended up with a large tub of zest and another 1.5 litres of juice, which I put in the freezer. Sadly I ended up having to throw out a lot of them as they had already gone off, so that's the end of the harvesting. I'm just not using them fast enough, so it's better if they just stay on the tree until I need them.

On Sunday, I moved on to flavouring salt. I used the zest I collected on Saturday. Be warned, if you are going to do this, use an old blitzing machine that you don't mind damaging. The combination of the abrasiveness of the salt and the acidity of the lemon will eat away at the plastic jug and dull blades. I used 500g coarse sea salt with 4 heaped tablespoons of lemon zest. Blitz until all the zest is reduced and evenly mixed with the salt. Then transfer to a paper lined pan and dry in an oven at 105℃ for around an hour to remove all moisture. Bottle once cool.

Making lemon salt

I also made a second batch with the addition of fresh rosemary. This time I used 500g coarse sea salt, 2 heaped tablespoons of lemon zest and 2 heaped tablespoons of rosemary leaves. Blitz and dry as before.

The finished salts

It was a good day and to reward my hard work I whipped up a batch of scones which I flavoured with – you guessed it – lemon zest! Topped with my strawberry jam, they were absolutely scrummy!