These Seedless Lemons Are a Game Changer for Cooks

No more pips in your iced tea, lemon glaze for pound cake, or on your fish fillets.

Few fruits enliven a dish quite like lemons. A fresh squirt can lend just the right amount of acidity to Italian classics like tomato lemon pasta, punch up chicken piccata—a true showcase for lemon's vibrant flavor—or add zing to a French 75 cocktail. From the zest to the juice, fresh lemons can do all of that and so much more—if you're willing to contend with those pesky seeds. But, wait, you may not have to: there is an alternative in the marketplace, a citrus phenomenon known as (drumroll, please!) seedless lemons. Here's what we discovered about this game changer, from its backstory to its multiple uses and advantages.

Meet Our Expert

• Brooke "Chef Bae" Baevsky, private chef and host of Overheard Eats
  

• Alex Jackson, vice president of sales and procurement for Frieda's Branded Produce
  

• Zak Laffite, president of Wonderful Citrus, a grower of seedless lemons

Related: Three Ways to Zest a Lemon (and Other Citrus Fruits) Without a Zester

What Are Seedless Lemons?

Seedless lemons deliver all of the brightness of conventional lemons but without the seeds. "They are a descendant of a Eureka lemon, which is pretty much the most predominant lemon you find in the grocery store, so it brings all of the virtues of that lemon, plus seedlessness," explains Zak Laffite, president of Wonderful Citrus, which introduced Wonderful Seedless Lemons—a premium variety of naturally seedless, non-GMO Project verified lemons—to produce aisles in 2019.

Same Zippy Flavor, More Juice

Brooke "Chef Bae" Baevsky, a private celebrity chef who cooks health-forward, allergy-friendly food and hosts the television show, Overheard Eats, has embraced Wonderful's seedless lemons wholeheartedly. "I use lemons in my desserts, and then I use the entire lemon in my cooking," she says, estimating that she blitzes through about 200 lemons a month. The lack of seeds, she notes, means there's more juice. "I find they're not too sour, not at all bitter—they have nice sweet notes," she says.

For citrus fans, there's nothing to lose, and everything to gain. "You don't have to make a trade-off between flavor and juiciness. If you like zest, you're not going to trade off on that, so you bring all of the good things from your standard lemon, and you overlay that with seedlessness," says Laffite.

Multiple Advantages

Lemon seeds can be bitter, says Laffite, so they can detract from the fruit's flavor or even the meal. And home cooks may not be well versed in handy tricks like using a mesh strainer to separate the seeds, adds Baevsky, so they resort to hand juicers and dirtying too many bowls or plates.

Time-savers: High in vitamin C, they can also act as a sodium replacement—and maximize another precious commodity. "It saves you the time of having to put that cheesecloth on your lemon, pick the seeds out of your marinade, or if you're having an iced tea, you don't have to worry about seeds getting stuck in your straw,” says Laffite. While some may call such incidents "little problems,” he says, for chefs, or any high-volume user, seedless lemons are a big-time boon.

Other pluses: "It's great, you cut it open, no extra dishes, squeeze it right into the food, and you know there's not going to be seeds that you don't want to eat, no choking hazards for kids, and you won't be fishing them out of a stew over your stove," says Baevsky.

The Road to Seedless Lemons

Seedless lemons benefit everyone from professional chefs to cooking and baking enthusiasts, so why has it taken till now for this no-brainer to gain traction?

Trial and Error

While seedless lemons have been around for 30 years, a few hurdles have hindered their progress, explains Laffite. For one thing, early seedless varieties missed the mark. "When seedless lemons first came to market, you would still find a piece of fruit that had an occasional seed," says Alex Jackson, vice president of sales and procurement for Frieda's Branded Produce, a wholesaler specializing in unique fruits and vegetables.

Worldwide Research

That inconsistency was a stumbling block. "You want a seedless lemon to be seedless, not seedlike," says Laffite. They also weren't viable for farmers because the light-bearing trees yield very little fruit. On a worldwide quest for truly seedless lemons, the Wonderful team found top-performing varieties in South Africa and Australia. "We had the advantage of being able to see how local growers were doing it and being able to test the fruit and see it in real-time in terms of how it delivers on all the value attributes that we were looking for, and it proved out," he says.

Jackson finds that today's varieties are "virtually 100 percent seedless."

Bearing Fruit

Another challenge, says Laffite,  was replicating the year-round availability of conventional lemons, which entailed concurrent planting in different regions. The goal was for customers to "quit the seeds, and never go back." The company now has groves in three regions in California, in Mexico, works with partners in Chile, and just planted in Argentina.

By the Bag

Rather than being sold in bulk, the lemons are packaged in one-pound, two-pound, and five-pound bags, which allows the company to head off any unintentional mix-ups in the produce aisle that might result in a seeded experience.

In time, it seems likely that seedless lemons will become every citrus enthusiast's, well, main squeeze.

Read the original article on Martha Stewart.