If you’ve been reading a lot of these recipe roundups, you’ll know how often limes feature. If you’re cooking with avocado, you’ll often need a lime. If you’re cooking with tequila – either because your life has gone terribly wrong or because the recipe calls for it – you will almost always need a lime. But you know what? Maybe it’s time we made limes the star of the show.
Lime creme fraiche cookies
We’re going to start with Dan Lepard, because he makes an incredibly prescient point about cooking with limes; compared with other citrus, you need a lot of them to extract a decent amount of flavour. Take his lime creme fraiche cookies, for example. A single lime only has enough zest to power five of them. If you’re prepared to put in the zesting effort, though, you’ll be rewarded in spades. These are lovely, delicate things that, as Lepard says, work brilliantly with ice-cream.
Key lime pie
Felicity Cloake’s perfect key lime pie from last year uses just as many limes – five in total, for a full-sized pie – but the tanginess is much more pronounced here, because you don’t actually cook the filling. Unlike its cousin, the lemon meringue pie, the lime juice acts as the agent that “cooks” the egg yolks contained within. Every day’s a school day.
Lime marshmallows
The acidity of lime is used to equally great effect in Tamal Ray’s lime marshmallows. If you have made marshmallows at home before, you will know that – barring any mishaps – they are substantially nicer than the shop bought variety, softer and richer and more delicate. But Ray’s decision to add lime juice makes them better still; they’re light and tangy and almost refreshing.
Lime bars
We can round out the sweet section of this list with the easiest recipe: Rock Recipes’ five ingredient lime bars. If you have butter, sugar, flour, eggs and limes in your house (which I do), then you can throw these gorgeous little cookie bars together in 40 minutes (which I will).
Watermelon and cucumber mint tzatziki
Let’s move on to the savoury ideas. Andrea Albin’s recipe for watermelon and cucumber mint tzatziki salad doesn’t put lime at the centrepiece as much as other recipes, but its inclusion is nonetheless vital. This dish is a blast of undiluted summer, and ready in seconds. Refreshing cucumber, refreshing watermelon and refreshing mint, doused in refreshing lime juice; beautiful, quenching simplicity.
Four-lime green bean salad
Only Yotam Ottolenghi would have the temerity to use multiple types of lime in a recipe, but his four-lime green bean salad just about warrants the faff. On the plus side, he counts lime juice and lime zest as two different ingredients, but then again, he also asks you to locate makrut lime leaves and half a tablespoon of ground Iranian lime. It comes together beautifully – a din of peas and beans and chilli and mint – but don’t make it until you’ve done your shopping.
Lime and coconut dal
So far, none of these recipes are designed to be eaten hot. Let’s remedy that with Rukmini Iyer’s lime and coconut dal from her book Roasting Tin Around the World. Like all her recipes, this is simplicity itself, but the result here is creamy and lively and gloriously yellow.
Brothy tomato and fish soup with lime
Similarly, Andy Baraghani’s recipe for brothy tomato and fish soup with lime is a veritable party in your mouth. The ingredients – cod, tomato, lemongrass, chilli, fish sauce, coriander – make for a complex, delicious slurp, but the last-minute addition of lime juice launches the whole thing into the stratosphere. If you’re making this, it pays to be a little bolder with seasoning than you would normally be.
Barbecued sweetcorn with burnt lime
We’ll end with a couple of family favourites. Corn on the cob is one of the best ways to get vegetables into a child, because they can hold them in their hands and pretend to be a beaver or a squirrel. I’ve started to cook them according to Riverford’s recipe for barbecued sweetcorn with burnt lime: rub some lime halves with brown sugar, pop them cut side down in a hot cast iron pan, wait for them to caramelise and then squeeze over the corn. Delicious.
Mango con chile y limon
Finally, my wife refuses to eat mango unless it’s prepared the way she ate them as a child, doused in lime juice. I can’t just write “put lime juice on a mango”, because that’s too easy. Instead, here’s Par Taste’s recipe for mango con chile y limon; it’s mango with lime juice on it, but also chilli powder. You’re welcome.
