- The sunshine, getting you through the cold chilly months.
We are talking about citrus fruits.
From lemons to oranges, these bright bursts
of sweet and tangy flavors have been
filling you up fridge all winter long,
but citrus season is coming to an end.
So what can you do to keep your produce
lasting well beyond the season's end?
We've got food blogger Jerry James Stone joining us now
with some helpful tips.
Always good to have you on the show.
And I was trying to guess what shirt you would have on.
I knew it was gonna be a lemon.
(Jerry laughs) It looks great.
- Yeah, that's a safe bet, that's a safe bet for sure.
- Okay, so let's talk about the best way to store citrus.
Is it in the fridge or not?
- Yeah, you know, it's in the fridge.
So the thing, like you just kinda mentioned, you know,
citrus season's coming to an end.
Citrus typically is a winter fruit.
While lemon trees can kind of produce all year round,
for the most part, citrus is a winter fruit
and so it likes to be cold.
So it looks great in a bowl on the counter,
the worst way to store it.
What you wanna do is take it and put it in a bag.
Usually citrus can sometimes come in a mesh bag.
I like to transfer it to a full plastic bag.
The reason for that is it likes to be cold,
but by putting it in a bag
you also protect it from the temperature in there.
So you don't want the fridge to pull moisture
out of the lemons or the citrus.
So I just put it in a bag, zip it shut, keep in the fridge.
I've had citrus last for months this way.
- So you say that citrus is a cold fruit
but how does the cold have an impact on citrus?
- Well, it just, you know,
you wanna store produce typically how it grows, right?
So citrus trees are producing oranges, producing lemons.
During those winter months, they'd like to be cold,
so by putting 'em in the fridge, they're gonna last longer.
By keeping them at room temperature,
they're just gonna go spoil and go moldy a lot faster.
- All right, so we know that food waste is one
of the third-most producers of greenhouse gas pollution.
So you're helping us keep waste out of the dump.
Let's say you have a ton of lemons.
What are ways that we can use the whole fruit,
peel and all, so we don't have to throw it out?
- Yeah, so you know, obviously lemonade is a great way to
like, you know, freezing the lemon juice, making lemonade.
What I like to do is I like to zest all my lemons
before I use them.
So you can save the zest
in a bag in the freezer, in an air-tight container.
It'll last up to three months.
Zest is a great thing to add to salad dressings
whether it's homemade or not, add it to baked goods.
You know, I make my own lemon pepper,
so I'll use the zest for that.
You can dry it out in the oven and then just
like chop it up with some pepper and some salt.
It's really great for that.
After I've expressed lemons
and get all the juice out of there
I'll actually just make a homemade cleaner.
So you can take the lemon peel, the leftover lemon peel,
cover it with some white vinegar, let it soak
for a day or two, strain it out, and then just dilute it
with water and it's a great homemade cleaner
that'll clean almost any surface in your house.
So just a way to easily use every part
of the lemon from the peel to the juice to the rind.
- That's a cool idea.
- So yeah, it is.
So you just talked about using up the whole lemon.
What's the best way to juice a lemon?
- So for me, you know, I tested this out recently.
There's a lot of, you know
put it in the microwave, roll it on the counter.
All of those methods ended up being the same when it came
to providing the amount of juice.
So the one thing that I found works best
is to put it in the freezer.
Put it in the freezer, and the only reason
that makes it easier is it actually just softens that rind.
So if you freeze it and then take it out and thaw it,
it makes it really easy to juice.
You'll get all of the juice out of that lemon.
The other things really kind of just work about the same
for the most part.
- Hmm, interesting, put it in the freezer.
Can you store lemons in the freezer anyway
to make them last longer?
- You can, you can, you can freeze them completely whole.
They're not gonna burst anything.
The fruit is, you know,
expandable enough that it's just totally fine.
So you can actually put them straight in the freezer.
You're just not gonna have that same texture
once you take it out.
So where it's nice and perky, when you have it fresh
from the freezer, it's gonna be kind of rubbery.
So you can use it for juicing.
You're not gonna probably wanna cut it up
or put it into your iced tea, but you can freeze them, yes.
- So, great, we learn so much from you, Jerry James Stone.
So good to have you on the show.
Thanks for joining us.
Love your shirt and we'll see you next time.
- Thank you, yes..