Dried lime
Whole limes boiled in salt water and sun-dried until they are hard, hollow and dark, used across the Gulf, Iraq and Iran as a souring agent and simmered on their own as chai loomi. The colour range from pale tan to near black is a difference in drying, not in fruit.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Citrus × aurantiifolia
- Family
- Rutaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- A cultivated hybrid rather than a wild species, so it has no native range of its own; its parent stock is South-East Asian and the lime has been carried through cultivation ever since. The dried product is associated with Oman, the Gulf coast and southern Iraq
- Drunk in
- Oman, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Bahrain
Character
Intensely sour with a fermented, almost cheesy depth that fresh lime has nothing of. Bitter if the seeds and pith are boiled hard, which is the usual fault.
Notes: sour lime, ferment, earth, musty citrus
History
Omani limes dried and shipped up the Gulf gave the Persian name limu omani, and the product moved along the same dhow routes as dates and spices. It is a preservation technology as much as an ingredient: a hard dried lime keeps indefinitely in heat where a fresh one lasts days, which is the whole reason it exists.
How it is drunk
In Iraq and Kuwait the dried lime is pierced and simmered with sugar as a hot drink in its own right. In Iranian and Gulf cooking whole limes go into stews and into rice, where they are either fished out or left to collapse. It is not a blend component in the European sense — it is a drink, or an ingredient, and not a note in a mixture.
Production
Ripe limes are boiled briefly in heavily salted water and then laid out to dry for weeks. The interior ferments as it dries, which is what produces the musty depth that separates the black ones from the tan; the darker the fruit, the further that fermentation went.
Preparation
Decoction
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 8 min
What gets confused
Black loomi and blond loomi are the same fruit dried to different degrees and are not different species, though they are sold at different prices and taste noticeably different. Makrut lime and its leaf are a different plant and a different product, and TeaHQ holds them separately.
Common mistakes
- Boiling one whole and hard. Pierce it, simmer briefly, and take it out before the seeds give up their bitterness.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Dried lime is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.