Brining Lemons for Salty Lemonade

Brining Lemons for Salty Lemonade

I’ve been on a beverage making kick lately, and this is one of my latest experiments. Following the directions at Wandering Chopsticks, I’m attempting to prepare some lemons to make Salty Lemonade. I had some trouble getting the lid of the jar to pop, and ended up having to use a water bath to boil the solution in-jar, so hopefully that hasn’t destroyed the lemon flavor. At the time I made this, I could only find one glass jar that I still had the lid to, so I went out the next day and got another nice glass jar with some spaghetti sauce in it to make a second batch (canning jars were $1.50 in single quantities, and spaghetti sauce jars were $2.00, so it seemed a good proposition to me). According to the directions, they should be ready for consumption a month after starting, so I’ll report back then to say how they came out.

Here is the setup I used to make the photo:
Setup shot for Brining Salty Lemonade
The lighting comes from one bare flash, behind the camera, bounced off of the ceiling. The jar is sitting on top of a shiny granite tile that I got at Home Depot, and the background is a piece of black craft foam. The carboard ‘roof’ is actually a gobo to prevent the flash from lighting the background. A minimal amount of post-processing was used to clean up the background a bit and increase the intensity of the lemon colors.

This entry was posted in Journal. Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to Brining Lemons for Salty Lemonade

  1. What made you want to try salty lemonade? It’s a bit of an acquired taste.

  2. mahto says:

    Oh, I’ve been getting it at some local Vietnamese restaurants for a while, and was curious how it was made. I think originally a coworker of mine dared us to try it, but i thought it was an interesting flavor so I kept at it. Thanks for sharing your directions!

  3. Esther says:

    You may have been having problems getting the jar lid to “pop” because you were re-purposing a glass jar + lid that were not intended for home-canning. Those lids are not the same as the ones made for canning at home, so if you try again & use a ball jar + band + fresh lid, you might have more success.

    • mahto says:

      Hi Esther,
      Thanks, yeah, that makes sense. I wasn’t too worried about it because it is a brining process, but I think if I do it again I will use some more suitable jars.

  4. vinh says:

    My mom use to have jars of these lying around in the garage. Never like the stuff while i was growing up. Every time I had a cold, I would get a spoonful along with some sugar. Anyways, your post has given me motivation to look for this next time I go to a Vietnamese restaurant.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>