Cool off with this elegantly tangy treat!
Lemon confit, a mixture of softened lemon peel and juice, is incredibly versatile. It can be added to pureed foods to impart a tangy, lemony flavor, including blended salad dressings, dips, garlic hummus, and pureed soups. It can also be added to vegetable stir-frys and side dishes, as well as fish and chicken, as a lemony topping.
Note that lemons can be made into confit using a variety of different methods and results. Here, we heat the ingredients in oil for a fast lemon confit. And as a bonus, you can extract the leftover oil, creating a lemon-infused olive oil, which can be used for other recipes or poured sparingly over fish or salad.
Fast and Flavorful Lemon Confit
Ingredients
- 5 lemons medium, juiced (discard seeds) and peeled as instructed below
- 3/4 cup olive oil not extra virgin olive oil
- 1 garlic clove finely minced
- 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
Instructions
- Peel the lemon into long strips with a peeler. Do not include any bitter white pith in the peel. Peel exclusively the yellow exterior. Chop the peelings into smaller pieces if desired.
- In a medium saucepan, bring 1 cup water to a rolling boil, submerge the lemon peels for 20 seconds, and remove.
- Combine the lemon peels, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, and salt, bring to a boil then reduce heat to a low simmer. Simmer for 20-25 minutes or until peelings are soft. Allow to cool.
- Store Lemon confit in a glass container, cover and refrigerator until ready to serve.
Notes
Nutrition Information
Have you made this recipe?
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I wonder if you could do this with pineapple; love to eat pineapple with ham.
Shirley, There are recipes out there for pineapple confit. It would have to be modified with coconut palm sugar or another clean eating sweetener in order for it to be clean eating. Do let us know if you try one!
I have more if a question than a comment can you eat the con fit lemons
If you like!
Is this recipe as given correct? I was looking for a lemon confit that is not the typical salt or salt/sugar process with a 3+ week maturation period. This sounded/looked to fit the bill. But: my 5 lemons gave a great deal more juice than 7 tbspns (3/4 cup in fact). Loth to waste good fresh lemon juice, I used 10 tbspns for this recipe (wanted a really intense lemon flavour) and kept the rest for other things. The cooking time of 1 hour seems vastly too much. I watched my mix simmering the whole time, stirring and tasting constantly. After 10 minutes of very gentle simmering indeed, the flavour was intense and layered. I let it go to 20 minutes at which point there was virtually no bubbling (ie, all the lemon juice liquid had evaporated) and the peels were starting to brown slightly. I stopped the process at this point, cooled and bottled. I have, in effect, some beautifully intense and tender lemon peel preserved in a deeply flavoured oil – exactly what a traditional meat confit is, in fact. It’s beautiful as a cooking condiment but not quite what I expected. Next time, I think I will use equal quantities of oil and juice and limit the simmering time to 15minutes.
Hey Philip, I’ll remake this as well and update the recipe as needed. Thanks so much for the tips! 🙂
So, I tweaked the recipe and came up with this updated version. It’s possible our “simmering” heat is a little different since my peelings took just about 25 minutes to soften. 🙂