How To Zest A Lemon

Lemon zest is a wonderful addition to baked goods.  If you are making cakes, cookies, bars, pies or muffins and want them to have lemon scent and taste, add lemon zest!

Do you love intense lemon flavor? Mild lemon flavor comes from lemon juice. BIG lemon flavor comes from lemon zest!  Have you not been making fresh lemon zest simply because you don’t know how to zest a lemon?  Now you will learn how to do it the easy way.

Don’t ever settle for the purchased dried lemon zest – it tastes old, fake and not even lemony.  Dried lemon zest that they sell in the spice jars is a far cry from the fresh lemon zest.  Whenever you have a lemon in your fridge and need lemon zest, make the real thing!

The best lemons for the lemon zest are organic lemons.  The lemons that are not organic are coated with wax, and that wax will end up in your lemon zest.  The organic lemons don’t have the yucky wax, so your lemon zest will be the lemon zest – pure and lemony.

Instructions on how to zest a lemon:

You need a lemon:

You need a box grater:

To zest a lemon, rub the lemon on the side of the grater that has small holes.  Keep rubbing and turning the lemon, so the yellow lemon zest gets grated away from the lemon.  Only grate the yellow stuff – the white pith that’s under the yellow is bitter, so you don’t want any of the white stuff… just the yellow.

When you grated off all the top yellow covering of the lemon, you have successfully zested that lemon.  See how easy it is to zest a lemon :)

Here’s a picture of how a lemon looks after you zest a lemon:

And here’s the picture of the lemon zest:

Now go ahead and add this delicious smelling lemon zest to yummy baked stuff!

And what to you do with the lemon itself after you zest it?  Well, use it for lemon juice, or if you are not ready to use it right away, you can wrap that lemon in a plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator.

Here are some recipes with lemon zest that are so yummy – lemon bundt cake recipe, homemade italian lemon ice and lemon bars recipe.