A simple lemon curd recipe and its nutrients

When striving for greater self-sufficiency, it‘s often best to begin with smaller, more manageable projects. Successfully completing these can provide a series of confidence boosts. Starting with a challenging project right away might lead to failure, which could discourage further attempts toward this goal.

It is for this reason I am setting out to learn how to make a lot of “simple”, but fundemental, recipes in the kitchen. Some that I have already explored include cranberry sauce, lingonberry sauce, sauerkraut fermentation, fruit pie and no-knead bread.

Lemon curd is one of my favourite ”fruit spreads” so it makes sense to know how to make this myself and, as it turns out, it’s very easy!

Ingredients

• 2 eggs
• 2 egg yolks
• 150g or ³/₄ cup sugar
• ¹/₂ cup fresh lemon juice
• 1 tbsp lemon zest
• 115g cold butter

Just four ingredients - egg, lemon, sugar and butter!

Method

1. Put the eggs, egg yolks, lemon juice, lemon zest and sugar into a bowl and then whisk together.




2. Pour the mixture into a small pan and stir over low to medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Do not let the mixture boil.




3. Cut the butter into cubes and add a few at a time to the pan while continuing to stir. Wait for the previous cubes to melt into the mixture before adding more.




4. Continue mixing the mixture until it starts to thicken. It will leave a coating on the spoon and on the sides of the pan.




5. One can either pour the lemon curd through a sieve into a sterilised jar or pour directly into the jar.

Nutrients

Lemons, as well as other Citrus fruits, are a rich source of dietary fibre, vitamin C, phenolics and flavonoids, all with potential health-promoting benefits, like antioxidant effects. These molecules can act as free-radical scavengers, to modulate enzymatic activity and protect against a variety of diseases, particularly cardiovascular diseases and some forms of cancer.^1,2 Lemon juice has been found to have particularly high antioxidant activity.¹

Essential nutrients that exist in 100g of lemon juice^1,5 in considerable quantities include (percentages are of RDI for a 31-50 year old female according to the Nutrient Journal running Global average): 64.5% vitamin C RDI, 5% folate, 4% pyridoxine and 3% pantothenic acid.³ See lemon juice‘s full nutrient profile at Nutrient Journal.

Also see the chicken egg’s full nutrient profile at Nutrient Journal.

References