Philip Duff challenged us if we could recreate lemon by combining other
food ingredients. Based on the flavor profile of lemon juice, we were able to
do so and present this finding at BCB in Berlin.
When you segment lemon into its flavors you will smell roses, fruity
notes, jasmin, green notes,... We visualised them in a kind of flavor wheel. So
if you take from each flavor one or more ingredients and you combine them in
the right quantity, you can obtain lemon without using lemon.
The ingredients we used, are jasmin, apple blossom, limebasil ( from KoppertCress), lemongrass and lemon thyme.
The recipe for 'lemon without lemon';
1 g apple blossom (Koppert Cress)
0,6 g apple blossom stalks
0,9 g limecress (Koppert Cress)
0,2 g lemon thyme
4,6 g lemon grass
1 jasmine flower (just the leafs) (Koppert Cress)
0,4 g sugar
You just muddle
all the ingredients together.
Instead of adding
lemon to you cocktail, you add the paste. At BCB we served a whisky sour;
Recipe:
45 ml Jack Daniels or other bourbon
22,5 ml water
9 g paste
11 ml sugar syrup (or less depending on your preference)
1 dash bitter
.
Add all the
ingredients to the shaker, add ice cubes and shake had. Sieve. Serve.
You will obtain a
whisky sour, which is not as sour as usual, but has the flavor of fresh lemon.
We also tried in
on other classical recipes like the White Lady, the Jasmin,... and it all
worked out. But if you like those cocktails because of their acidity, you
should add extra citric acid, lactic acid,... to lower the pH from 5 to around
3.
Or not into alcoholic drinks?
It also really
worked well in Coca-cola. Want to serve Coca-cola into a new way? Add a little bit of coke
to the paste, shake and add the 'lemon juice' to the rest of the Coca-cola, it will make a much more complex profile.
