Easy Peezy Lemon Squeezy (Or, When Life Gives You Lemons...)

Once upon a February evening, two squash novices set about making some lemon cordial....

Having debated amongst ourselves for some time about which recipe to use for our cordial, we opted for one which looked simple and used both citric and tartaric acid. We never quite got to the bottom of exactly what function these ingredients have in a lemon-based foodstuff (citric acid is extraced from lemons anyway, isn't it?) but we reckoned that it would probably be a preservative one. And since we'd gone to the trouble of ordering them in from this website http://www.simplynatural.org.uk/ we thought we might as well use them. WE checked in all the places local to us that we thought might stock these things, but to no avail.

So, the recipe we followed can be found at this address http://www.cuisine.com.au/recipe/lemon-cordial. First, we started with a lovely looking bag of lemons (the recipe calls for 6, but ours were a little on the small side so we used 7 for luck). We scrubbed and zested two of them, and juiced these and the rest.






Meanwhile, we dissolved 2kg of sugar in 1 litre of water. I had been on the lookout for cheaper sugar since it was pointed out to me that lots of preserving means using lots of the stuff, and, happily, I found some in time for this recipe. It's Silver Spoon 'Homegrown Sugar', and the reduction in food miles excited me until I remembered that extracting sugar from sugar beet uses huge amounts of energy. Still, the back of the packet assures me the heat byproduct of the process is used to heat vast greenhouses where tomatoes grow, so at least its not wasted. At 70-odd pence a kilo from our local corner shop I think its about half the price of cane sugar.

So, now we'd made a syrup. To this we added 30g each of citric and tartaric acids and stirred well to dissolve. Once this was cool, in went the lemon zest and juice, and we had a stock pot full of cordial!










So we sterilised a few bottles using the technique we learnt last month for the marmalade, and bottled about 2 and a half litres. Here is a picture of one of the kitchen hands taking the sterilising process very seriously:



















The cordial is stronger than most shop-bought ones, so only a little is needed. It is Very Lemony, which I liked, but the more lily-livered among you may want to add more sugar.

WE'll keep you posted on how long it lasts on the shelf (although it might not get a chance to prove itself, as we seem to be getting through it at a fair old rate)