Ingredient: Kaffir lime leaves
Category: Herbs, Spices & Seasoning
Season: All
The kaffir lime (Citrus hystrix DC., Rutaceae), also known as kieffer lime, makrut, or magrood, is a type of lime native to Indonesia, commonly used in Southeast Asian cuisine, and widely grown worldwide as a backyard shrub.
The kaffir lime is a rough, bumpy green fruit that grows on very thorny bush with aromatic leaves.
It is well suited to container growing.
It’s bumpy exterior and its small size distinguish the green lime fruit
Uses
It’s hourglass-shaped leaves (comprising the leaf blade plus a flattened, leaf-like leaf-stalk or petiole) are widely used in:
Thai cuisine, (for dishes such as tom yum),
Lao cuisine, and Cambodian cuisine; for the base paste known as "Krueng".
The leaves are also popular in Indonesian cuisine (especially Balinese and Javanese), for foods such as sayur assam - literally sour vegetables, and are also used along with Indonesian bay leaf for chicken and fish.
They are also found in Malay and Burmese cuisines.
The leaves can be used fresh or dried, and can be stored frozen.
The juice and rinds of the kaffir lime are used in traditional Indonesian medicine; for this reason the fruit is sometimes referred to in Indonesia as jeruk obat - literally "medicine citrus".
The oil from the rind also has strong insecticidal properties.
The zest of the fruit is widely used in Creole cuisine and to impart flavour to "arranged" rums in the Réunion island and Madagascar.
Fresh, these can be hard to track down, but they also come freeze-dried rather like bay leaves, but with that unmistakable oriental-Thai flavour.
Use dried, pounded in a pestle and mortar or soaked in a little hot water, and they're almost as good as new.
Fresh leaves can be kept in the freezer.
Other names for Kaffir lime (Citrus x hystrix):
Burma: shauk-nu, shauk-waing |
Philippines: swangi |
Cambodia: krauch soeuch |
South Africa: K-lime |
China: fatt-fung-kam |
Sri Lanka: kahpiri dehi, odu dehi, kudala-dehi |
Malaysia: limau purut |
Thailand: makrud, som makrud |
Indonesia: jeruk purut, jeruik limo, jeruk sambal |
Laos: makgeehoot |
The Oxford Companion to Food (ISBN 0-19-211579-0) recommends that the name kaffir lime should be avoided in favour of makrud lime because kaffir is an offensive term in some cultures, and also has no clear reason for being attached to this plant. (For this reason, some South Africans refer to the fruit as K-lime.) However, kaffir lime appears to be much more common. |