Reddit's Feelings About One Ingredient Proved Us All Wrong

When it comes to internet recipes, the world is overflowing with experts. Each food blogger has their own take on all of the classics, full of little tricks that let them (they hope) stand out from their thousands of competitors. But the more you learn about cooking, the less sense these tips often make. At times, it can seem like they're reading straight out of a potion recipe from Hogwarts, telling you to stir three times clockwise and eight times counter-clockwise, or else your potato and leek soup might start belching acrid smoke. So, it's no wonder that folks often feel that they can disregard these little touches. In fact, I have often suggested in my own writings that learning to simplify these bloated internet recipes is actually the best cooking hack — but not when it comes to cutting the acidity, as one Redditor recently discovered.

In a post, titled "My apology to lemon juice," a home cook explained how, when following online recipes and YouTube cooking tutorials, they would always skip the spritz of citrus when instructed to add it to a dish. It seemed to this Redditor not just like an unnecessary addition, but a cringe-worthy move that just couldn't taste good in a hearty soup. It wasn't until culinary catastrophe struck, and they burned their aromatics, that they listened to wisdom and added some acid in the hopes of cutting the bitter flavor. The result, of course, was a magically vanishing bitterness.

As that Redditor discovered by chance, lemon juice does a whole lot more than just add lemon flavor. A squeeze of lemon can boost the savory flavor of a dish, as its acidity acts similarly to salt, enhancing the other flavors in a dish. And, really, you should always add an acidic component to soups, both for the flavor enhancement and its ability to tone down salty and bitter flavors. But those are just functions of the acid in lemon juice. In truth, the lemon flavor of the juice isn't that strong. Go ahead, try a mouthful — I'll wait.

Alright, hopefully you didn't take that invitation seriously. If you did, well, one of the first tips you need for cooking with lemon is that it's much better going in your soup than it is in your mouth. If you really want to give your cooking a zing of brightness, you'll find it much easier to do with lemon zest. With all of the citrus oil packed into the peel, you can infuse a whole bunch of lemon aroma into a dish without affecting moisture or acidity levels.

Now, if that original Redditor is reading, I am sure that they won't take kindly to this suggestion, but in addition to punching up their soup with lemon juice, a hit of lemon zest would make it even better. I don't like to imagine the kitchen calamity that will need to be unleashed before they open their mind to adding lemon zest to a pot of beef stew, but, when they do, they will again be pleasantly surprised.

The beauty of public forums like Reddit is that they create a space for enterprising internet users to share something they've learned or ask a question to the greater community, and often these askers find a useful response or hear that their shared knowledge improved a fellow user's meal. The curse of these forums, on the other hand, is that for every helpful response there are likely to be half a dozen individuals either actively trolling or angrily expressing some semi-relevant opinion in a way that makes them feel superior. This is as true of posts about lemon juice as it is about anything else. But if our original poster had committed to a greater exploration of the Reddit-sphere, they might have taken the leap much earlier.

A quick scan reveals countless posts about the value of lemon juice — and other acids — across the culinary spectrum. There is, in fact, even a post on r/cooking titled "Just a friendly reminder: your soup needs acid," which could have saved our original poster a lot of trouble. Elsewhere are posts about how many uses one can find for a bottle of lemon juice in the fridge, how to make and store your own lemon juice at home, and even what to do if you add too much lemon juice to a soup — perhaps the next culinary question for our original poster. Their first post was a public apology to lemon juice, but after seeing all the intelligent posts about lemon juice, it seems like instead they ought to be apologizing for not listening to the people of Reddit.