How does preserved lemons salt soultion form a gel?
It is possible that you have precipitated the proteins to some extent by the salt concentration (known in biological fields as &quot;salting out&quot;), which might produce a gel-like blob, just like cooking egg-white does.
You can indeed also precipitate proteins with sugars (e.g. here), though it is more commonly used for extraction of organic acids (e.g. decenoic acid) from fruits etc, it will take quite a bit of experimentation to do this as it usually requires a very high concentration of sugar and quite a high concentration of protein too. You are more likely to get the pectin (which is a polysaccharide) to work, before you get the proteins to precipitate in a sugar solution.