You can find dried limes in specialty spice stores and online. Traditional dried limes are first boiled in a salt brine and then left to dry until they're rock hard. Some of you may know them under the name Limu Omani. They are a staple of Iranian cooking and infuse any dish to which they are added with deep, citrusy, slightly tangy/funky back notes. Until I took a walk with a Persian friend when we lived in California, I had never heard of them.
During the course of our walk, we came across a lime tree covered in strange looking small fruit. None of the limes had been picked, and they had shriveled up and dried on the branches. I turned to my friend to say how unfortunate the waste was, but she was already picking every lime that she could, using the bottom of her shirt to contain them. As we walked back to my house, she described the process of preparing the limes, and reminisced about her grandmother laying rows of the boiled limes out in the sun to dry. That being said, she added pragmatically, "if you find limes like these which are already dried by the sun, why go to the trouble of buying fresh limes and brining them first in order to dry them? These should taste pretty much the same for our needs." She then went on to make an absolutely delicious chicken stew with a couple of the limes -- fragrant and tart -- which I will attempt to make in the weeks to come.
Since then, I have used all of the limes that were left from that tree except the 2 tiny ones above, but decided to take her at her word and dry limes without brining them all the time, as illustrated above by the funky near black lime. I leave the fruit on a sunny window sill until they get dark and become very light, a husk of their former selves. They also develop a different smell, still citrusy but with undertones of fermentation. Any time I want tart, funky notes in a dish, I rinse one off and add it to the pot where it rehydrates and leeches yummy goodness into whatever dish I am cooking.
I may not be making these in the traditional manner, but home taste tests of both have shown that my friend's easy no-brine method works just as well. I just used one in a Pork, Prune, and Ground Almond Tagine and the end result was delicious.
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