This recipe uses the following Faust Family Farm products:

• Eureka and/or Meyer Lemons
• chicken or duck eggs

Lemon Curd is a food which people either love or would rather leave. It can be used as filling for cakes, cheesecakes, or cookies, topping on sugar-type cookies, put on toast or English muffins, eaten just as it is. I’m one of those people who LOVES to eat Lemon Curd like a pudding.

Lemon Curd is incredibly simple to make. The main concern is keeping the temperature low enough that the egg whites do not cook and turn white and lumpy.

After making it three times, I happened to see two women make it on YouTube. Every recipe is different.

My basic recipe comes from the 1997 revision of The Joy of Cooking, p. 998.

Lemon Curd Ingredients & Directions

In a medium stainless steel or enamel saucepan, whisk together until light in color:

            3 large eggs (I used duck eggs)

            1/3 cup sugar (I used Florida Crystals evaporated cane juice)

            Zest of one lemon

Add:    ½ cup strained lemon juice

            6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter cut into small pieces. (I used salted butter.)

Whisk over medium heat until the butter is melted. Then whisk constantly until the mixture is thickened and simmer gently for a few seconds. Using a spatula, scrape the filling into a medium-mesh sieve set over a bowl and strain the filling into the bowl.

Then stir in: ½ teaspoon vanilla

Let cool, cover, and refrigerate to thicken. 

Refrigerated, this keeps for about a week. (I kept it for at least 3 weeks just fine.)

One of the two videos I saw used 1 tablespoon lemon zest while one only used only 4 tablespoons butter. Both added the butter after cooking the lemon juice, sugar, and eggs. Both strained the cooked curd. One added the lemon zest as the very last thing.  Neither video used vanilla. Both women used makeshift double boilers, a metal bowl over a pot with a bit of simmering water, to keep the eggs from separating. Much of the thickening will happen after the Lemon Curd is refrigerated.

The first time I made the Lemon Curd with Eureka lemons.  I had a little extra lemon juice left over so I just added it. The result was good but quite tart and lemony. It probably would have been very good as the filling in a cake (but I’d eaten it all before I could try that). The second time I also used Eureka lemons but I stuck to the amounts given in the recipe. This was not quite as lemony. The third time I used Meyer lemons, which turned out to be much less tart and lemony. I just wanted to eat it by the spoonful.  Next time I may try equal parts Meyer and Eureka lemon juice.

Commercial Lemon Curd is very smooth in texture. The first time I made it I did not strain the zest out because it seemed a shame to waste the zest.  I would say this is a personal call: do you want a very smooth Lemon Curd? Or do you want the chewiness of keeping the Lemon zest in the finished product? Adding Vanilla at the end really smooths the flavor.

I’ve generally found recipes to be very forgiving if I don’t do exactly what it says. It appears that is very true with making Lemon Curd.