This isn’t really a recipe as much as description of a thing that you may find useful. What you do is, you take a bunch of lemons, as many as you can fit in a container you can seal. Peel them and keep the peels. Pat the peels dry (we don’t need the meat of the lemon at all for this, you can do whatever you want with it) and put them in your container. Now fill the container up with sugar. Shake it around as you pour sugar in so it gets really packed in there. Once you are confident that the lemon peels are packed solidly in sugar, seal the container up and let it sit on your counter for a few days. Eventually you will see water pool on top and the sugar will look wet. Wait until you see all of the sugar have this same wet look. Probably takes 3-4 days to complete, for me. You can at this point remove the water, and you can fish out the lemon peels from the sugar and throw them away. You will be left with a bunch of wet looking sugar. That’s lemon sugar and it’s great. It adds way more lemon flavor than zest does, and holds up better under cooking. I have no idea how long it lasts but it’s quick enough that I make it as I need it, just have to plan a bit ahead.
So what you have done is dehydrate the lemon, and for some reason, this causes the oils in the lemon peel to bind with the sugar. You are left with super citrus sugar, which is why it looks and feels wet. Works with any citrus fruit.
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