A mother-daughter conversation on food and cooking (mostly)

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Lime Cordial and Lime-oncello


Those tiny yellow limes you grew are so intense, Mom -- they're wonderful, but more acidic than regular limes. Today I used some of them in booze-related experiments.

Lime-oncello
First I zested 14 of them and started a batch of limoncello using limes instead of lemons.

I read a few recipes and enjoyed this overly detailed recipe the most. I more or less followed it but didn't filter the vodka -- it seems silly to filter something that's distilled. We had a bunch of Skyy vodka and since we don't drink vodka very often this seemed like a good use for it -- no grain alcohol in my version.

Two hours in, the vodka is already starting to yellow (it's in the jar on the right). After a few months it should be very pretty. Either that, or it'll look like urine. We'll see.

Lime Cordial
So then I had a bunch of dermis-free limes -- way too many for margaritas or mojitos. I thought about juicing them and freezing the juice, but again, they're so acidic, if they were to lose any delicate lime flavors through freezing they wouldn't be very useful -- all tartness, no flavor.

I poked around online for a while and decided to make lime cordial. Rose's Lime Juice is lime cordial, but Rose's seems pretty gross lately. Maybe it's the high fructose corn syrup. I made a gimlet with it over the summer and it wasn't very enjoyable.

Recipes for lime cordial online mostly contain lime juice, simple syrup, citric acid and tartaric acid. I have neither of the latter two ingredients. I decided the limes' acidity was intense enough to make up for the missing citric acid. For the tartaric acid I used cream of tartar. I'm no chemist, but cream of tartar retains the acidic flavor of tartaric acid, which I think is the goal of the acid, and is also a potassium salt...and I figured salt is a positive thing from a preservative standpoint.

I think I can taste the potassium from the cream of tartar a little. There's a slight bitter aftertaste similar to potassium chloride -- the taste of those "salt substitutes," or of Marmite, or of banana bread with too much baking powder. But Lawson says he can't taste it, so it's probably not a big deal.

After some adjustments, here roughly what I ended up with:

2 cups sugar
1 cup water
1 cup freshly squeezed lime juice
1 scant teaspoon cream of tartar

Boil the water and sugar until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat; stir in lime juice and cream of tartar. Strain into bottles and refrigerate.

I'll make gimlets tonight. And I'll let you know how long the lime cordial keeps.

4 comments:

Eva said...

Okay, this gin rickey is great. One jigger of gin, one jigger of lime cordial, and ice and soda water. It's very smooth.

Kris said...

You are really something. Every time you have a spare minute you invent a new dish or drink!

Eva said...

Update: we drank all the lime cordial and it was GOOD. May I never lay eyes on another bottle of Roses Lime Juice.

Kris said...

Oh, good. I was wondering how that turned out. I agree that Roses Lime Juice is vile.