Avoiding Lime Rocks

If you love margaritas, Mexican food, key lime pie, or lime garnishes for your gin and tonic, you appreciate a juicy lime that yields cooperatively to a knife. Limes aren’t happy in the refrigerator for long, but if left on the counter, their skins can become dried out and rock hard. (My skin tends to be dried out and flaky, more like a pie crust.)

I’ve seen the advice about submerging limes and lemons in jars of water, but when I experimented with that method, I was grossed out by the way the limes became grayish and slimy. Those two adjectives are never appealing together, but then again, it’s hard to imagine slimy ever sounding appealing. (My friend Vicky will think of an example in .2 nanoseconds.) What to do? Once a lime reaches the rock phase, it takes a hacksaw to cut into it. While it can still be perfectly juicy inside, if you attempt to squeeze a wedge, it is likely to rocket out of your grasp and give your cat a concussion.

Here’s my easy fix: place limes and lemons in a shallow bowl with about a half inch of water. I suppose the bowl doesn’t have to be shallow, but it should have a wide enough bottom for the fruit to sit in one layer, touching the water. Anyway, the shallow bowl turns your experiment into a veritable art installation! Once a day or so, simply roll the fruit over, so the dry side is now submerged. If you forget, no biggie. The consequences are not the same as when you forget to feed your sourdough starter. (Don’t even think about it!)

Here’s my margarita. No salt for me, thank you, and no hacksaw required. By the way, you don’t need to use itty-bitty key limes to make a delicious key lime pie. The normal-sized Persian limes in supermarkets work just fine and are a whole lots easier to zest and squeeze. Just be sure to make your own pie crust — dry and flaky.