Meyer Lemons are the cool kid on the block everyone wants to be friends with. Sweet, less bitter, along with a less yellow, more orange spectrum sort of pleasant color. Typically the thing to do is a preserved lemon situation but this is too much salt for use in cocktails. What we can do, however, is make something similar while still preserving the method of lemon sherbet which to me is like a mother sauce for the bar and a bit under represented these days.

Sherbet, not the crap you buy in the frozen and novelty section, but the sugary deliciousness you make with lemon peels, sugar, and lemon juice. You are making this stuff right? Because not only does it use waste, it is also tasty. Oh so tasty.

Quick refresher. Take a butt load of lemon peels and muddle them up with some sugar, let this oleo saccharum (bar nerd speak for oil, sugar) sit for anywhere from an hour to a day or longer. If you did it right you’ll have this ultra gooey, fragrant, magical ooze. Once satisfied with time requirements, add equal parts lemon juice by volume of the sugar you put in. That’s really it. Like Bob Marley said, “Stir it up! Little darlin’, stir it up!” Allow it all to coalesce. You may not need to apply heat, but if you do, make sure not to use too much. Mix. Melt. Strain. Yum.

You can make sherbet with any old citrus you want and we do this a lot in the restaurant during citrus season which occurs right now. So what are you waiting for?

And from whence do you come Meyer lemon? According to the Googs, Meyer lemons were from China and a dude from the U.S. Department of Agriculture named, you guessed it, Frank Nicholas Meyer, brought them over here in 1908. They’re said to be a cross between a citron and a pomelo/mandarin hybrid…A pommandarin? A mandello? Why don’t they have these at the farmer’s market?

This dude, old Oscar Meyer, I mean, Frank Meyer, was one of those old timers that really had a rich life. I mean, think about it, he went to China back at the turn of the century. Pretty ballsy. He sent over 2,000 clippings back across the Pacific. We have him to thank for the horse chestnut, the persimmon, asparagus, and a shitload more.

He was known to speak to plants more than humans. A little weird, but he was a Dutchman, after all. Anyway, the very same river that he used during his journeys would also take be the main ingredient of his lonely demise. His stiff, lifeless corpse was found floating down the Yangtze in 1916.

In honor of Frank, lets make some fermented Meyer lemon sherbet.

I did two of these. One with whey and one with Meyer lemon juice. Both at 3% salt. The whey came out pretty good too but I screwed up one main component because I got lazy. I didn’t cut the pith out and I should have. This made the fermented whey Meyer lemon sherbet a little too bitter in my opinion. Not too bitter, mind you, but enough to make it too weird.

Anyway, these were both salt brine fermentations with the juice being weighed out and the salt being added to that at 3%. An easy calculation if you just use the 1% rule and then multiply by 3. So lets say 800 grams of juice is needed. 1% of that is 8, multiply that by 3 and you get 24. That’s the amount of salt you need.

This got crazy fizzy after just three days.

I strained it off, kept the salty juice, then stripped the flesh from the peels and cut the pith out. it took about a half hour.

I threw away the pith and kept everything else then weighed it (1,456 grams), added equal parts sugar by weight, and blended it all in the trusty vitamix. This went through the chinois to clear any lumps and then into a bottle marked “Double Meyer.”

It’s ultra delicious. I put some, along with fermented aleppo pepper salsa, on my fried pork staff meal. Tasty.

Hard to find the time lately but it feels good to post again.

Your AI generated image for this post, #420. Dude!