i live in the greater los angeles area and we've got a meyer lemon (lemon x orange) tree in the backyard, and some of them were getting a little sad and squishy. figured i'd take a shot at making lemonade for once and maybe it was a bad idea because now i can never go back.
followed the chef john recipe where you make oleo-saccharum from the zest (basically just toss the zest with plain sugar and let it sit for a few hours so all the essential oils get osmotically pulled out and become a syrup) and mix that in with boiling water, then put all the actual juice in after it's cooled down. other additions on my part were just a solid tablespoon of salt (it is 95+ degrees here right now, we need it), the last dregs of what remained in the honey jar, and i had one of those lemon-lime electrolyte packets laying around so i just dumped that in too, fuck it.
meyer lemons are a bit sweeter that regular lemons, so even though i cut down the amount of sugar in the recipe by about 20% it's still incredibly sweet. diluting it about 50:50 with water hits exactly where i want it sweetness wise.
much like knowing how to make a killer chocolate chip pecan pie, i am now cursed to know how to do this whenever i have five lemons laying around. the burden of knowledge.
