I have a friend from Peru who gets homesick and can’t cook very well. Sometimes for this dish back home called “Ceviche”. It’s raw fish with assorted ingrediants that’s chemically “cooked”. Well awhile ago I made her Ceviche and she was very impressed I got it as close as I did considering I’ve never eaten it before and am very “white” (she calls anyone with American passport white). However I was still off from the flavor she remembers.
Anyway I figured out what I did wrong. There’s two types of Ceviche. Peruvian and Mexican. The recipe I found was for Mexican Ceviche which uses lime juice to chemically cook the fish. Real Peruvian style needs lemon juice. However the source that said that also said only Peruvian lemons have enough acid to cook the fish.
This sounds like a sales ad for Peruvian lemons to me.
Is there any difference between Florida lemons and ones from Peru? Is Florida lemon juice okay for chemically cooking white fish?
I’m a broke college student here so I can’t be importing lemons from all over the world. She graduated last month and I wanna make her some (safe) Ceviche for a graduation present. She’s been a very good friend to me, and you should be careful not to give your good friends the trots.
Edit: in the title it should read ‘propaganda’ not ‘proganda’:smack:
Do you have reason to be suspicious of your source? It seems reasonable for me to believe that fruits grown different places will vary in taste and composition.
To sort of answer your question, the limes I had in Mexico always seem stronger than the ones I get here in the states. If you’re worried, you could always “cook” the fish in lime juice first, and then serve it with lemon wedges to squeeze over to get more of that flavor.
Being a food science buff I started looking into some of my references and online. From what I can tell the Peruvian lemon is a different variety/species of fruit which seems to have a different taste, acid levels aside. It is possible that this taste may not be the same no matter what type of US lemon you use - but it’s also possible that it may be so close as to be the same. I seem to be finding a lot of pro-Peruvian lemon propaganda, but nothing in the way of scientific or blind testing.
If your friend said that it was good but close with lime juice, I’ll bet any lemon juice may be close enough as makes no difference.
I’ll also note I found a lot of blog and recipe-related posts out there where people were arguing over whether or not a Peruvian lemon was really a variety of lime. I cannot find a taxonomic listing to see how close it may be…
The stuff I’ve come up with about Peruvian lemons makes them sounds and looks suspiciously like the fruit we called “citron” in Cameroon (not to be mixed up with English “citrons”, which are an entirely different fruit.) They are small, round, usually green and pretty juicy. The taste is more to the lime side than the lemon side, but isn’t quite a lime. It’s also got a bit of a bitter element to it. I could never make good lemonade out of the damned things.
If they are the same thing, then they are found on two continents and chances are you can find them somewhere stateside as well. Check your local Latin and Asian supermarkets and see if you see any funky looking citrus.
And not to knock Puru on it’s obvious but kind of weird lemon pride, but if these are the same things they were almost certainly chosen for the ability to grow in crappy soil.
I wonder if one could duplicate the taste by using lime juice (or a mixture of lime and lemon) with a bit of the white citrus pith from the peel added in? That white stuff can be very bitter, and might provide that note, if that’s what’s lacking.
I’ve spent a silly amount of time doing research, and all I’ve learned is that citrus taxonomy is pretty ridiculously complicated. I haven’t been able to come up with the species name of the Peruvian"lemon" nor my West African “citron.”
In fact, I’m beginning to suspect they are all just Mexican limes. Compare the google images of Purvian lemons to those of Mexican limes. The look pretty much the same, yeah? Were use using regular or Mexican (Key) limes in this?
Although this outfit seems to be trading “green lemons” from Senegal. They wouldn’t call them that if they were actually limes, would they?
Peruvian here. Peruvian-style (yes, there is such a thing) ceviche is made with corvina (white sea bass), and the cilantro-ginger-lime-onion mix is usually blended smooth and then poured over the fish for the best flavor. In Peru we call this a limón, which is the word for lemon. To us, a limón is green. We call those yellow things limas (limes).
The closest thing to a Peruvian lime, which I use when making my ceviche here, as your huge limes are tasteless, are these, key limes.
I had to add, this is what we think of ceviche with limes!
Give me a break. That was an aside, presumably intended to be humorous. The question is whether or not there are Peruvian lemons that have significantly different taste and/or acidity.
