Hello and welcome to In The Kitchen With Matt, I am
your host, Matt Taylor.
Today, I'm going to show you how to make lemon curd.
If you're not familiar with lemon curd, it's similar to a
custard or a pudding.
And it's used in a variety of ways.
You can eat it as is.
You can spread it on toast or on scones.
I have a lemon blueberry scone video here on my channel,
which is really, really yummy.
You can also use it as a filling for like cupcakes or
cakes or tarts.
You can whip cake, whipped cream and fold it in
and make a pastry cream out of it and use it to feel cream
puffs or éclairs.
A lot of ways that you can use this lemon occurred and it's
super easy to do only four ingredients.
Well, five if you include both the lemon juice and the
lemon zest, but those both come from a lemon.
So anyway, really easy to do simple ingredients.
If I can do it, you can do it.
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Let's get started down below in the description box,
you'll find a list of the ingredients and their amounts.
And I'm going to start by zesting the lemons.
You want to do that first before you squeeze the juice
out of it.
And I do recommend using fresh lemons that you get at the
store or pull off of your tree.
If you have a lemon tree, don't recommend using just
store lemon juice.
You can, but it just won't be the same.
And so let's zest these lemons.
Lemon zest is optional, but it'll make it taste that
much better because there's so much flavor and the zest.
And so I have a microplane Zestra here.
I did a review on this on my channel a while ago.
You can find that video review if you want, but you can use
any kind of a zester.
And let's just zest you can zest that this way.
We hold the zester over your bowl and just run
your lemon acrostic.
Or you can just go like this.
Which is a very common way as well, whatever way you want
to do it, and if you go like this, then
it's kind of quicker to do it this way, to hold it this way
and do it.
And then you tip that over like that.
And we want to get about a tablespoon of zest.
And don't be alarmed if you don't have a zester, you don't
have to go out and buy one of these.
If you don't want if you're going to be using zest from
citrus a lot in your cooking and baking and you recommend
picking up a zester.
But zest is typically just an optional ingredient that just
adds more flavor,
and we all like more flavor, don't we?
So there you go.
That's about a tablespoon.
I'm going to set the rest aside.
And now we want to get the juice out of the lemons.
We want about a half of a cup.
And I'm just going to roll these a little bit and I'll
just make them a lot easier.
And then I have this manual citris pressor and or you can
just use your hand and squeeze it totally up to you and
there's a variety of these that you can use.
And so
I'm just gonna come up here.
And we'll just cut the lemon.
And again, you can just use your hands, squeeze them
in there, or just use this
little press I like to press, you don't get the lemon juice
on your hands.
But do what you want to do.
So if you are looking for other ways to use your lemons, if you
have a lemon tree,
then consider making lemon curd
depending on the size of your lemon large lemons,
sometimes you have about a fourth of a cup of
juice in them.
And so you may only need like two lemons, two large lemons.
Now I have my half a cup of lemon juice.
And what's neat about this recipe is we're not using any
kind of a thickener, like we're not using cornstarch, which you
would use for like a pudding and the pectin, natural pectin
in the lemon.
And then the eggs are what's going to thicken this curd.
And then I'm about to take.
My pot here and now we separate the eggs from the yolks I'm
going to use for eggs, but only one of the one of those eggs is
going to be separated.
Put the.
OK, and then this one I'm going to separate and you can just
break it and then just transfer it back and forth between your
two shells and that will capture the yolk.
OK, so I separated the egg white from the yolk there and
have it in there.
There are a variety of recipes out there, so we'll use just
pure egg yolks and no whites at all.
So we just use all the eggs and some we'll use a combination of
both if you don't have anything else that you want to make with
the egg whites.
And I would just put them in there.
But you can save the egg whites and make like a
meringue with it.
Meringue cookies.
You can make an awesome angel food cake.
I have an amazing angel food cake recipe here that you can
try or just make an omelet with it, whatever you
want to do.
So I got three full eggs and then one egg yolk in here.
And I want to whisk this.
In this plot, there are two main methods to make this one
just by using a pot on low heat and now there is a double
boiler method where we would just put water in the pot about
an inch, two inches deep, and then we put a bowl larger
bowl on the top and we are gently heated up that way.
Similar if you're melting chocolate, I'm just
going to do it this way.
I don't feel like doing the double boiler method, but you
can do that as well.
Now I'm going to add one half cup of sugar.
In there, and that's what's best for about two minutes.
Give or take two minutes.
It doesn't have to be exact.
And the next, we will add in that zest and the lemon juice,
again, one half cup of lemon juice and we will
watch that together.
And now it's ready to take over to the stovetop and slowly cook
it and stir it onto that step.
We are over at the stove top and I have the heat set
to medium low.
We want to just slowly cook those eggs and that's going to
be what gives us a really nice consistency.
And we are just going to stir, stir and stir for about five to
10 minutes until it gets nice and thick or it's about 170
degrees Fahrenheit somewhere around there.
But you don't need to use a thermometer or anything.
I'll show you how to check it
and eventually it'll start getting a little thicker.
I'm at about the seven minute mark right now.
Not quite there yet.
OK, and then once it starts to get really thick, it's been
about 10 minutes, then you can take your spoon and.
It should cling to the spin.
And if you leave it alone, there's going be a light
starting to bubble just a little bit by itself,
and that's how we know that it is ready.
And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove this
from the heat.
And then I'm going to add in my butter and the butter is going
to add flavor and consistency and it's going to cool
it down.
I have a half a cup of butter, cold butter that I just cut
into little about tablespoon chunks
and I am using unsalted butter.
But you can certainly use salted butter if you like.
All right.
And once the butter is completely melted, the lemon
curd is pretty much done pretty easy.
Right.
And it was only about 20 total minutes of active time.
And now we are going to transfer it to a bowl to
let it chill.
And now what you can do to get the smoothest lemon curd as
possible is run it through a strainer and that'll catch any
of the larger bits of lemon zest.
So let's just run this look how nice and silky smooth
that looks already.
And now just.
Press that around and let it go through that sieve Streiner.
And what you're left with, if you can see that, is all the
chunks of lemon zest that you may not want on there.
Of course, you can leave it in there if you want totally up to
you or if you really don't want to use the lemon zest to
begin with, then you don't have to use don't invest if you
don't want to.
But look how amazing that looks.
I'm going to come in here at the spoon and just do
a little taste.
Wow, that is awesome.
Now, if you want to just eat it warm, you can just eat it
warm just like that.
But traditionally what will happen is you will take some
plastic wrap and we'll put some plastic wrap over this and
you'll push it down.
So it touches the top of the crust.
Keep on it and say custard.
So push, push it down.
And so it goes on the top of your lemon curd.
And this will protect it from developing a film over the top
and now just placed this in the refrigerator for about
an hour.
And then it'll be ready to use for whatever you want to do.
And then I like using this bowl because then I have a lid and I
can just put on there and store in the fridge and you can store
it for up to like two weeks in the fridge and then use it as
needed for your toast, for your scones, for some
whipped cream and make awesome pastry cream for your cream
puffs or éclairs or make a tart with it, whatever you
want to do.
All right.
And once it has chilled, you can remove that plastic.
And ready to be used however you want, and if you wanted to
kill faster, once it's done cooking, then you can sit
the bull in like another larger bowl of ice and then just stir
and cool it down quicker that way if you want.
There we go.
Now I can use it however I want.
I'm just going to dip into some a little bit and give
it a taste.
Look at that silky smooth lemon curd.
Absolutely amazing.
I'm Matt Taylor.
This has been another episode of the case with Matt.
Thank you for joining me as always.
If you have any questions, comments or requests, put him
down below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
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Take care.
Time for me to dive into this some more.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Uh uh.