Food porn: Meyer lemons

It's Meyer lemon time of year, and our newest tree is loaded. You probably know this, but a Meyer lemon is a cross between an ordinary lemon and a mandarin orange that was discovered in China by a representative of the US Department of Agriculture in 1908. Mr. Meyer knew what he had.

Wikipedia merely says of its culinary value that "The fruit is yellow and rounder than a true lemon with a slight orange tint when ripe. It has a sweeter, less acidic flavor than the more common lemon ... and a fragrant edible skin."

Sweeter, less acidic doesn't say the half of it. The difference between a Meyer lemon and a grocery store lemon is like the difference between

• Kalamata olives and California canned black olives
• Parmigiano-Reggiano and the stuff in the green can
• Raw sugar and processed sugar
• 1982 Mouton Rothschild and Gallo Hearty Burgundy
  (I happily drank the latter in college, and luckily bought a case of the former when they hit the market in 1984 or '85, because I was being paid far beyond my worth then. I still have two bottles left, plus a few similar bottles.)

It's not just that one is better than the other. It is that one has a complex taste and the other does not. While a Eureka lemon adds sourness, Meyers add taste.

Our Meyers are just coming in. We've been picking a few, but the photo above is our first real harvest of the season. Magazines are full of Meyer lemon recipes now. This weekend my partner made a lemon pudding cake thing that was spectacular, and chicken thighs with lemon juice, zest, and slices and a pile of middle-eastern spices. Scrumptious.

Of all the fruity things we grow, Meyers are the one we don't let a single one of get away. While they're ripe and still on the tree, we use a lot in cooking, of course, and make lemonade for the kids and margaritas (the best in the world) for ourselves. Sometimes I squeeze a glassful, add half a teaspoon of salt, stir, and sip like a liqueur.

Then when the huge crop is full ripe, I harvest it, squeeze them, and freeze either 2 cups (for lemonade in our-size pitchers) or 1.5 cups (for said margaritas) in quart-size baggies. They stack nicely. I also keep a cruet of the juice in the refrigerator to add a few drops to glasses of water or tea.

The only problem with Meyer lemons is that their extreme juiciness makes them hard to handle if you want something to squeeze into tea or on fish. A eureka lemon lets you control a squeeze, but a Meyer falls apart and gets juice all over your fingers.

The wikipedia article said the skin was edible. I haven't tried it, except as zest. I'll have to try it.

One of our eureka lemons has a sucker coming up from below the graft that has huge lemons with extremely thick skin, perfect for Indian pickled lemons. I've given them to an Indian friend's mother in the past, but I think I'll be pickling some of them soon. The recipe calls for filling the jar with lemon juice. I wonder how it would be to use the thick-skinned lemons for the pickles but use Meyer lemon juice for the pickling. I think I'll probably find out.