Easy Lemon Curd - How to Make Lemon Curd on the Stove Top

Today we are making homemade lemon curd. Now lemon curd tastes like sunshine on a spoon. If you've never made homemade lemon curd before, let me tell you, once you see how easy and quick it is to make, you will never buy lemon curd at the store again. Lemon curd, all it is, it's a combination of eggs, sugar, butter, lemon juice, and lemon zest. So let's get started. So what do you do with lemon curd? Well, the possibilities are pretty much endless. One of my favorite ways to enjoy lemon curd is spread on a fresh baked scone, on a piece of toast, over ice cream. I love to use it to pipe inside of cupcakes, in between the layers of a cake, on top of a cookie, spread over a bar cookie. Like I said, endless. Or you can also just eat with a spoon. I'm going to use this batch of lemon curd we are making today on crepes. I'm helping with a bridal shower and we're having a crepe bar and lemon curd is a perfect thing to put inside of a crepe. I'm going to link to what we're doing at the shower down below so you can check out all the details on how to put together the crepe bar. Now a few weeks ago I shared with you one of my favorite all-time desserts and we made a mini lemon angel pie and that recipe does use lemon curd. Now in that recipe we made our lemon curd in the microwave and I'm going to link up here to that recipe but today I'm going to show you how to make lemon curd on the stove top. All right, first we're going to talk lemons. That's a really important ingredient in lemon curd and we are going to use lemon zest and lemon juice. Now you want to use real lemon juice for this. None of that stuff that comes in the green bottle you buy at the grocery store because if you're going to use that you might as well just buy lemon curd at the store but I want to show you a couple of my favorite tools to use when we are working with lemons. Now we always want to zest the lemon first before we juice it and to do that we're going to use a micro planer which is a really tiny grater. It usually comes in a plastic cover like this and I like to take it and put it in the opposite direction because what that does is it forms a little holder for our lemon zest as we zest our lemon. Now when you zest your lemon you just want to take out that outer layer of the yellow. You don't want to go down into the white part of the lemon because that part is bitter. So just take off the very outer yellow part. We're going to need about a tablespoon of lemon zest and depending on the size of your lemons, I'm using rather small lemons today. It took about two lemons to get that amount but if you're using a bigger lemon you probably only need one. All right after we have our lemon zested then we can go ahead and juice it. I've already got, we need two-thirds of a cup of lemon juice and I've already got most of it here but we're going to juice one more lemon and again it's going to depend on the size of your lemons. If you have large lemons you'll probably need three lemons or so. If they're smaller probably about six. My other favorite little lemon tool is this lemon juicer. You're going to take your half of a lemon. You're going to put it in with the cut side going down and that's going to then push down and our juice is going to come out and you're not going to get any seeds from the lemon into your juice and it helps you to get all the juice out of that lemon. All right I've got a little magic trick to show you today and it is my favorite way to separate an egg. So for the lemon curd we're only going to use the yolk of the egg and we're going to need three egg yolks. So I'm going to show you how I like to separate eggs. Now one of the tricks with separating eggs is you always want to break the egg cold right out of the refrigerator. Don't let your eggs come to room temperature. We're going to take a plate and we are going to crack our egg onto the plate. All right then we're going to take an empty clean water bottle. We're going to squeeze that water bottle put it up next to the yolk and release the water bottle and it is going to suck the yolk right up inside of it leaving the white on the plate and then we just pop it right into our bowl. How amazing is that? I'm going to put my egg yolk or white into the bowl. Now you can save these egg whites to make a meringue some other yummy dessert that needs egg whites but we're only going to use the yolk today. You want to see it again? All right crack our egg take our water bottle squeeze it let it go. There we go. So we're going to make like I said our lemon curd on the stovetop. So we've got our saucepan and into our saucepan we are going to add our two-thirds of cup of fresh squeezed lemon juice. We're going to add in a cup of sugar and those three egg yolks and then we're just going to mix that together and we're going to cook it over just a medium heat. You want to do this slow and not too fast because you don't want to burn it and it's you kind of have to babysit it you need to stay right with it and stir it pretty consistently and as it cooks it's going to come to a low boil and it's going to start to thicken up. Okay after it has thickened up and it's going to get like a thick syrup it will continue to thicken as it cools but we're going to add in our half of a cup of butter and stir that all in until the butter melts and then we're also going to add in our tablespoon of lemon zest that we've got in here. Make sure you get it all in there and then just stir until your butter melts. So after we've got all our butter melted we are going to pour it into a bowl and then we're going to pop it in the refrigerator to let it chill and thicken up. Look at that. If you are a lemon lover you are gonna love this and you're absolutely gonna want to just eat it with a spoon. It's so good but we need a little cool first and thick it up but before we put it in the refrigerator I'm going to put some plastic wrap over the top of it and I'm going to push it down and so it actually lays right on top of the lemon curd. What this is going to do is prevent a skin from forming on top of the lemon curd. So go ahead and chill it several hours overnight and you're going to find all kinds of amazing ways to use this lemon curd. Now if you're as much of a lemon lover as I am you're going to want to click over here and check out my small batch of lemon bars. So good and in there I also link to the full-size lemon bar recipe and that lemon angel pie it's another favorite. So make sure to check out all my recipes here on YouTube, subscribe to my channel, share me with your friends and we'll see you back in the kitchen next week.