We’ll tell you when a bottle in your cellar reaches its window, or an ingredient you cook with comes into season.
Preparing
Rotate to portrait
PAIR is designed to be held upright. Turn your phone back to portrait to keep going.
Australian round lime
Citrus australis · Citrus
40 pairings
The Australian round lime (Citrus australis) is a native Australian rainforest citrus from the subtropical east coast, bearing round to pear-shaped green fruit about 3 to 5 cm across with thick, oil-rich skin and juicy, sharply acid pulp. One of the country's flagship bushfoods, it is prized above all for marmalade, but also flavours drinks, sauces and preserves with a clean, fragrant lime tartness.
Picking a good onedrag
Just picked, oil-tightPapery, shrunken, mouldy
Market freshThe all-rounder: marmalade, sauces, drinks, grated over anything.Buy it
RindColour even, gloss flatter, glands still raised
WeightStill heavy, the thick rind firm all round
Stem endScar dry and pale, flush with the rind
Scratched peelFragrant when rubbed, the resin note a shade softer
What to look for, from just picked, oil-tight to papery, shrunken, mouldy.
Keeping ittap a band
Below about 8 C the oil-rich rind pits and browns in tan patches. A few days in a cold fridge is survivable; weeks at that temperature are not.
Humidity
90-95%
The rind is thick but mostly oil and air, so a round lime left bare on a bench hardens, shrinks and loses the spring in its peel within days.
Airflow
Gentle, not sealed
A loose or perforated bag, never sealed: shut tight the stem end sweats and blue-green mould collars the calyx in a few days.
Degreens beside apples and bananas
It makes almost no ethylene itself, but the gas from apples, bananas and pears strips the green from the peel, loosens the calyx and hurries decay.