Sunday, October 18, 2009

A Year in the Making, Day 48

A few months back, I foolishly volunteered to make lemon curd for the green room for SteamCon, so today I put on my curdmaker's hat.

Ingredients:

5 lemons
2 sticks (16 tablespoons butter)
2 cups sugar
6 eggs

Equipment:
Citrus reamer
Double Boiler
Canning jars
Zester
Mesh sieve
Whisk
Spatula

Now if you don't have all of the "proper" equipment, don't panic. I don't have it either. Here's my citrus reamer, for example:



Yes, that is one of the beater from an electric hand mixer. They work just fine to ream citrus fruit, and you don't have an extra tool cluttering up your kitchen drawer.

And here's my double boiler:



Yep, a saucier pan set inside a sauce pan. Here's the innards, how I keep the bottom of the inside pan off the bottom of the outside one, and away from the direct heat:



So, now that you've seen the tools, here's the directions. It's pretty simple.

In the saucier pan, add the zest from the outside of your five lemons. Cut up the butter in cubes, add that too. Juice the lemons - the five of them should give you right about 1 cup of juice. Don't worry about the pulp, you'll strain it out later.
Add 1 1/2 of the 2 cups of sugar. Bring your double boiler up to a roil and whisk this mixture occasionally till the butter melts.

In a separate bowl, whisk the 6 eggs together with the other 1/2 cup of sugar. Doing it this way avoids getting "scrambled eggs" in your mix. When the butter is melted in the lemon mixture, slowly whisk the eggs & sugar in. Keep whisking occasionally until the mixture thickens. You can tell when it's done by inserting a metal spoon into the curd - it'll stick to the spoon with a thick coating when you remove it.

Pour the curd through your mesh filter, using the spatula to scrape the sides and press against the zest. Bottle and refrigerate. It has a cold shelf-life of about 3 weeks, but I'll bet you it won't last that long in your fridge.



Some of my favorite ways to serve it

- over poundcake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream

- on an english muffin or scone

- as mini tarts

- add as a finishing touch on top of strawberry shortcake

I also accomplished some jewelry last night and this afternoon. I found these lovely glass teardrop beads, and they became pairs of cluster earrings. They look so much like grapes to me!

Purple grapes:



Golden grapes:

1 comment:

Michele said...

Very pretty earrings, I was going to ask what goes with with lemon curd but you explained it well.