I love new tea discoveries and just the other day I was told of a new gourmet fruit that’s great with tea. This fruit is actually a lemon…well, not quite…it’s a cross between an ordinary lemon and a mandarin orange. It’s called a Meyer Lemon.
This lemon hybrid is less acidic than a regular lemon and has more juice. It has a round shape, yellowish-orange thin skin, dark yellow pulp, and smells like honeysuckle. The flavor is sweet, lemony and mandarin—all in one.
I don’t know why I’ve never come across a Meyer lemon before; but I understand it is a great favorite among gourmet chefs and excellent for baking, preserving or making lemonade.
But…most importantly, it tastes great sliced and squeezed in a cup of soothing gourmet tea. Give it a try.
It siunds very nice, but to try it would cost a minimum of $55, so I’ll pass.
Meyer lemons are not grown commercially, as far as I know. In California in the early 1900s there was some attempt to grow them commercially, and to popularize them, the Meyer lemon growers advertised them as good fruit trees to grow at home. The commercial growing eventually died out because the trees can be difficult to care for and the fruit can bruise easily — it should be clipped from the tree rather than pulled off or allowed to fall — but individual trees did well in local back yards. Many homes were built and sold with a Meyer lemon tree as part of the landscaping, and people were buying and planting them in their back yards as late as the 1970s. We have one in our back yard at home, and it gives us lemons basically year round. As far as I know, the main source of Meyer lemons in California is those trees in private back yards, so if a restaurant or market sells them, that’s likely where they got them. Some markets and restaurants offer to buy them from local residents, but they don’t pay much for them. Something like $10 for 200 lemons, when they sell them for at least $2 a pound (2 or 3 lemons). You couldn’t even get a dinner at the restaurant where you sold the lemons, by selling them all the fruit from your tree!
By the way, Meyer lemons make superb lemon curd to eat with tea!