Fried Lemons Are The Showstopping Addition Your Salad Needs

When life gives you lemons, you can make a lot more than lemonade. A squeeze of lemon juice can lend brightness and balance to richly flavored dishes, mellow out foods that are overly salty, and (as the likes of Cate Blanchett will tell you) give a glass of hot water a lift. Even its peels can add color and a fragrant hint of citrus to sweet and savory dishes.

While the individual parts of a lemon have their own unique powers, the fruit can and should be enjoyed as a whole — skin, juice, pith, peel, and all. One of the tastiest ways to do so is to fry it in slices until the edges are slightly charred and the center is caramelized. If you can resist eating them out of the pan, toss a few in your next salad to add punchy, complex flavor. Here's how to make it happen. 

The first step in making fried lemon slices is to slice your lemons according to your preferred texture. Thicker slices will yield a juicier center, while thinner slices will come out almost chip-like. Once you've finished your knife work, the next step is to remove the seeds and blanch the slices in salted boiling water for a couple of minutes, just to take away some of the bitterness of the skin. 

Next, remove the slices from the water with a slotted spoon, pat them dry, and gently fry them in olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. (If you have a splatter guard, now would be a good time to use it. Seriously.) Fry them for about five minutes, flipping occasionally with a pair of tongs until both sides are burnished to your liking. Finally, transfer the slices to a plate and season them with flaky salt. 

Once they've cooled on a plate or a wire rack, they're ready to eat — but you might want to hold off if you want to make at least one specific type of dish stand out. Here are some of our favorite ways to incorporate them into a salad. 

When you're making a salad (or any dish, for that matter), it helps to think about balancing flavors and textures. Fried lemon slices are a little punchy, a little sweet, a little salty, and a little crunchy at the edges, which makes them good bedfellows with all sorts of ingredients. 

As a jumping-off point, you might try adapting non-salad fried lemon recipes into salads. Take Alison Roman's recipe for pasta with zucchini, feta, and fried lemon, which is finished with toasted walnuts, feta, herbs, and an extra drizzle of olive oil. To transform the recipe into a salad, you could thinly slice some zucchini and fry them in the same oil you used to fry your lemon slices and arrange them in a fun pattern on a platter with the lemon, finishing the whole thing with feta, fresh herbs, olive oil, and black pepper.  

If you don't think a salad is a salad without lettuce, try chopping up the fried lemon slices and adding them to a vinaigrette for a zingy dressing over your favorite greens.