I'm not big on making sauces at home. Pasta sauce, sure. Yeah, I'll make gravy for Thanksgiving. But you won't find me whipping up creamy béchamel, tangy hollandaise, or any of the other classic French mother sauces at home on a weeknight. Pan juices thickened up with a knob of butter normally do the trick for any piece of protein I'm usually cooking.
But, there was I was, standing at my kitchen counter a few nights ago, dreaming of a sauce I had at a restaurant. The simple yellow swoosh of a sauce came on a plate alongside pan-seared octopus at Roberta's, a Brooklyn restaurant that serves some of the smartest simple food in the country under the guise of being a pizza joint.
Described only as "Meyer lemon," the sauce was at once bright, bitter, and lightly sweet. I know the Meyer lemon, a hybrid of lemon and Mandarin orange, is one of the highlights of winter cooking, but I'd never experienced them like this before. I had to know what sort of citrus wizardry was at work here, so I spoke to chef de cuisine Nick Barker.
Barker told me the sauce was, basically, nothing more than whole Meyer lemons, blended into submission with a bit of simple syrup (aka sugar syrup) for sweetness. No peeling, zesting, or blanching. Just cut the Meyers in half, flick out any visible seeds, and blend. The sauce doesn't even require olive oil to emulsify it, thanks to the natural oils found in the lemon's skin. "If you get good Meyers, they retain a nice bitterness since you don't cook them," he said. The result is a spot-on balance of sweet and sour.
Put lemons in a blender? I can do that.
The technique couldn't be any simpler: Halve and seed Meyer lemons and blend them, periodically scraping down the sides of the blender to make sure everything gets incorporated. Add simple syrup (I used a tablespoon of simple syrup for each lemon I used) and season with salt to taste. Bonus: It will keep for the fridge for a few weeks.
Don't have Meyer lemons on hand? Barker says that the same technique works with regular lemons: Just peel the lemon and blanch the lemon rinds before blending the flesh and blanched peel with the simple syrup as directed above.
What you're left with is a sauce so glorious that no one will believe it took you less than 5 minutes to make. I use it almost exclusively on fish—a seared fillet of red snapper, a tangle of grilled octopus, or a few plump shrimp—but the sauce could easily be thinned out with olive oil and a bit of honey and transformed into a supercharged lemon dressing for salads, too.
Looks like I'll have to rethink my no-sauce-at-home policy.