Cocktails with Fresh lime
Fresh lime is the small green citrus fruit prized in cocktails for its sharp, aromatic juice and oily peel.
Substitutes for Fresh lime
Lemon carries the same acid with a rounder aroma and makes a different drink. Bottled lime juice is preserved and flat. For zest alone any citrus works, and the perfume changes with it.
Often confused with
Key lime
Smaller, more floral, more acidic, more seeds and less juice for the work, and famous in a pie and rarely worth it in a shaker.
Makrut lime
Grown for its leaves and its knobbly peel, with almost no usable juice; a recipe asking for lime never means this one.
Storage
Two or three weeks refrigerated, though limes take chilling injury below about 9 °C — the drying and hardening at the ends is that injury rather than simple age, and a cool room suits them better than the cold shelf. Cut wedges last a day at best and lose their aroma first. Bringing out a shift’s worth ahead of service is standard practice; commercial citrus is warmed above 10 °C before extraction for the same reason.
