Homemade Lemon Curd

I personally can’t understand buying lemon curd from a store any more, not now I’ve made it at home and realised how easy it is, and how much better it is than anything on a shop shelf. Agreed, if you get the posh stuff in the shops you’re going to come pretty close to homemade, but you’re spending unnecessary pennies because making it at home is dead cheap too!

The only down side is that it does take a bit of patience and a keen eye to make sure it doesn’t over cook, but making it once will leave you with enough curd to keep you going for a while. And actually, doubling or tripling the recipe wouldn’t mean it will make much longer to cook out really so in less than an hour you could make enough to keep you going for months!

Homemade Lemon Curd is so lusciously zingy and smooth, and not at all ‘stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouthy’ (Yeah you heard it, that’s a real phrase….) Then in comparison I find store bought lemon curd very glutinous and unnatural tasting. I suspect a lot of cornflour goes into the mixture to thicken it, but it just ruins the smooth texture you can get with just a bit of patience! Also just how the supermarkets manage to make their lemon curd so fluorescent is beyond me! Just using the egg yolks and lemons themselves gives a lush yellow colour, you don’t need any food colouring at all, let alone neon stuff!…..which leads me to question just how much real lemon actually goes into the store bought stuff!

Ok store bought lemon curd rant over….on to the recipe…you’ll need

Grated zest and juice of 4 large Lemons

4 Large Eggs

12oz (350g) golden caster sugar

8oz (225g) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 dessertspoon corn flour

This recipe makes about 1 litre of lemon curd so you’ll need to sterilize around 3 or 4 350g jars. To sterilize the jars you simply need to put them in a pan of water and boil them. Then, to dry them, put them on a baking sheet and put them in the oven at a low temperature until they are dry. Easy! Once you’ve put the jars in the oven, start making your curd, they should be dry by the time you’ve finished. (Remember, you don’t want to be putting hot contents into a cold jar, you risk smashing the jar – so filling them straight from the oven is best)

Sterilizing is really important when making jams and preserves as any bacteria in the jar will prevent mean the contents spoil much quicker. It essentially defeats the object of making a preserve. There are loads of other ways of sterilizing, steaming, dry heat, the microwave – they’re all effective. Check out this this e-How article, it features lots of different methods.

So, on to the recipe…

Begin by grating the zest of your lemons using a fine grater. You can of course use a zester but I prefer to have very small bits of zest rather than bigger strands. But just do whichever you prefer! Once you’ve zested than half the lemons and get as much of the juice out of them as possible.

Whatever you do, don’t do this wrong way round – there is a time when I juiced the lemon, realised I’d forgotten to zest them and tried to zest the hollow lemon halves….not easy!!

Next, crack your eggs into a saucepan and whisk them until they’re blended.

Then simply add all the rest of your ingredients to the pan. Use a sieve to strain your lemon juice in case there are any stray pips or pith.

Put the pan on a medium heat and whisk it continuously until it thickens, this will take about 8-10 minutes. Once it has keep it on a low heat for a couple more minutes to ensure there’s no raw corn flour flavour in there. At this point it shouldn’t be so thick you can spread it, it just needs to be about the thickness of double cream. Remember, it will thicken more once it sets. If you get it too thick at this point you’ll get something reminiscent of that dreaded shop bought curd!

Now pour your curd into the hot sterilized jars and fill them as full as you can and then cover with a wax disk. This means prevents air getting to the curd and means it will last much longer until you first use it. Seal with a jar lid or greaseproof paper and an elastic band and leave the jar to cool.

Once it’s cooled completely you will be able to label the jar. If you do this when the jar is still warm the glue will just melt and make the label peel off!

And there you go, perfect homemade lemon curd that kicks the a** of shop bought curd any day!

Now here’s another bonus….you’ve now got the recipe for any curd you like – orange, lime – whatever – just interchange it with the lemon. For lime I’d use 6 limes, and with oranges maybe 2-3 depending on the size. You could even use grapefruit…..hmmmm I wonder what that would be like….actually surely you could use anything that you can juice?.... Pineapple? That might be bit weird…Apple? Again I think that’d be weird…Oooh raspberry…..that could be good! I think I’m going to be broadening my curd horizons and trying some if these out!

xx