With Victoria Bucknam
From Food for Thought by Food Columnist Heather Atwood: Along with baking their own bao buns and pulling their own fresh mozzarella, Evenfall preserves lemons for a delicious preserved lemon vinaigrette. Victoria Bucknam, the chef the day we made a video, stepped out of the cooler checking on a large commercial jar with the label long peeled off, filled with lemons and brine.I am sort of a persevering preserved lemon fanatic; I am fascinated by them, want to love them, but am often disappointed. I’ve tried to make them myself, but, to be honest, I feel I always end up with mushy lemons and a lot of salt. With North African origins, preserved lemons find their way into tagines and flavorful chicken stews that harbor olives and bay leaves. Salted lemons were clearly a way of preserving a heavy harvest. Like any preserved food the result is far from its original taste, actually becoming an entirely different food, in this case a salty bite of soft lemon peel. But with lemons sometimes at 50 cents a piece in the grocery store, we don’t have a preservation problem. So, if the preserved lemon recipe simply means an interesting way of adding sodium chloride to a chicken stew, I’m not that interested. Evenfall on the other hand served this fresh, minty preserved lemon salad with their cornmeal crusted cod; the flavors worked beautifully; there was a tang, bite and sweetness to the salad only achievable with these preserved lemons. Victoria’s recipe is sweeter than the ones I’ve known, so the results are more versatile, and less just an innovative way to pour salt.
