7 minutes ago, Wholemeal Crank said:Waking this up after a long time, because of a marvelously mellow tea that ended a terrific meal at MoMed in Los Angeles. It was lemon-fennel tea, with a larger than I'd have dared use quantity of fennel, and a bit of lemon that I could just see as a rounded slightly orange-yellow bit of rather irregular (like it had been dried/shrunken) floating mostly underneath the fennel. Our server said something I didn't quite catch about it being made with a preserved or fermented lemon, wish I'd paid more attention at that moment. And it was deliciously fennel with strong sweet licorice/anise notes but also just enough that was distinctly fennel to confirm that it was not made with anise. And the lemon was remarkably subtle. It was not sour, hardly even tart, and certainly did not seem salty enough to have been made with a typically salt-preserved lemon, or sweet like the lemon had been candied or preserved in syrup. It was simply tamed enough to not need any more sweetness than provided by the fennel in order to be wonderful. And there was zero of the bitterness that creeps into my own lemon-infused teas where I slice some of my home-grown eurekas into the teapot, when I let it steep long enough for that to be extracted from the pith of the peel.
How might that lemon--probably a meyer lemon--have been preserved/dried/prepared?
I know people do make a sweet lemon confit, but I haven't tried it myself. Here's one recipe.
This one is reportedly from Alain Ducasse
