When I worked with a wonderful Korean lady, she spoke of drinking lemon tea when she had a cold. I looked this up to see if I could get some to surprise her, and it turned out to be more of a jam! You add boiling water to 2 spoonfuls of the preserved sweetened fruit, and there’s your tea. Yuzu has less juice than other citrus fruits, and has a bitterness to it. You can also layer in some grapefruit to add more of that tartness.

Recently I saw a way of making it that appealed, and I had some gorgeous lemons to use so off I went.

Lump sugar has a slightly vanilla scent, so I was tempted to eat a chunk just to see, but I didn’t.

4 large lemons, if waxed, wet them, scrub with salt, then rinse
1 blood orange or normal orange if you fancy
Runny honey – optional, probably 2 tbs per layer
1 x 500g bag of lump sugar, also called rock sugar

Slice the lemons into quarters, de-pip as much as you can, and then slice each quarter crosswise into pieces.

Do the same with the orange.

In a large container with a tight lid (my jar was a 1 litre jar for 4 large lemons and 2 small oranges) layer in half a lemon’s worth of pieces, some orange, and then some sugar. Add honey here if you wish. Continue layering until you have sugar as the last layer.

Close the lid and sit the jar at room temperature until the sugar dissolves. Depending on the volume, it may take a few days to dissolve all the sugar. It took 4 days for mine to disappear. During this time, stir the fruit using a clean spoon everyday.

Mine’s been sitting for about a week now, and needs a bit longer for it all to soften up. Some recipes state to leave it in a cool, dark place for 6 months, so I’m going to wait a while longer before tasting it, even though it smells gorgeous.