Boston chef Ana Sortun has a name for that: lemon umami. “Preserved lemons add a fermented quality that a regular lemon would not,” she says. Sortun, who first encountered preserved lemons when she worked for the Tunisian-born chef Moncef Meddeb some 22 years ago, was so taken with the condiment, and Eastern Mediterranean cooking in general, that she opened her own restaurant, Oleana, to honor the cuisine. Chef Michael Solomonov, best known for his landmark Philadelphia restaurant Zahav, agrees: “Sometimes it just doesn’t cut it to squeeze a lemon on top of a dish, and that’s when preserved lemons come into play. They add a big punch of flavor: heavy citrus, heavy floral notes from the oils in the peel, and ultimately heavy umami. It’s that extra something in the background of a dish that piques your curiosity.”
Israeli-born chef Einat Admony, of the Middle Eastern restaurant Balaboosta, in New York, is similarly effusive in her praise. For her, preserved lemons are, simply, “insane.” So much so that she “literally uses them in everything.”
So what is this lemon that is not quite a lemon—that is more than a lemon? Let’s take a look.
