…add some salt and preserve them!
Inspired by Delicious Slow Chili Peppers (btw. third set of those is just about to be fully eaten), I wanted to can more food. After furious Googling I had three new options:
- Canned tomatoes
- Pickled ginger (a.k.a. Gari, sushi ginger)
- Lemon pickle (a.k.a. Leems, preserved lemons)
I decided to try preserving lemons, since the recipe sounded quite weird. Basically one just needs lemons, salt and a can. Simple things are often the best.
There are quite many recipes found for the lemons preserved in salt so I’m not going to copy-paste any of those here. Important things to remember are to keep everything clean which goes into can, and make sure the lemons are submerged in lemon juice in the can.
The most observant readers might have noticed that the can in the photo below does not contain enough juice – which is true. I added some after the photo was taken (and my son had fetched more lemons from the grocery).
The lemons get to bathe in room temperature for some weeks (some say even months) before the can is moved to fridge.
It takes about a month from canning before the lemons are ready to be eaten. We have still about two weeks of waiting time left.
Since I hate waiting, I decided to can some ginger while at it. Gari recipes are also too easy to find so I’m only going to mention that one needs ginger, salt, sugar, water and rice vinegar.
Preserving process is also “the usual”, nothing exotic there. Maybe just one tip: peeling ginger is easiest with a small spoon. Try also to make the ginger slices as thin as possible. A mandoline slicer is good I’ve heard (don’t have one so I just used a very sharp cooking knife).
It takes only about three days for the Gari to be ready to be eaten and our set was nicely ready for our sushi-Friday 🙂 Although I have to admit the slices could have been even more thin, they were still a bit crunchy after just three days in the can…