After a lemon dilemma, I’ve turned my hand to the process of dehydrating lemon zest and turning it to Lemon Zest Powder.

Life can often give you lemons and, as I found out the hard way, pests can taketh them away too! That was my dilemma this week. My fully laden lemon tree was obviously too tempting for rural critters who enjoyed them so much they stripped the rind and left the flesh untouched, still hanging on the tree!

Who does that, you may ask? Well, according to Mr Google, the likely villains are possums, rats and mice. Living rural we deal with pesky wildlife all the time, but I wasn’t expecting how hungry they were, en masse!  In one afternoon alone I collected (or picked from the tree) more than 40 lemons that were either completely or partially ruined. In the compost they went! But what was going to stop them destroying the rest of the ripe lemons that had survived? Probably nothing! So with that in mind, I harvested them all.

Now, what does one do with 100 good lemons?

I have so many recipes in my blog already that use lemon as an ingredient (type ‘lemon’ into the website’s search field to find a few), along with preserving lemons whole in salt, and infusing them in alcohol for a delicious tipple. I was inspired however to do something I haven’t yet blogged about – and that is dehydrating the zest and turning it to a powder. Just imagine having lemon zest on hand year round! I couldn’t resist it, and off I went on my ‘Save the Lemons’ zesting project.

How to make Dehydrated Lemon Zest

The process is very simple and easy if you have a dehydrator (which I do have) but could also be achieved in a low temperature oven over several hours.

1. Wash the lemons in water to remove any dirt (scrub them if necessary, particularly if you have used sprays).
2. Simply peel the zest with a vegetable peeler (much fast than attempting to zest numerous lemons with a hand grater) and try not to remove too much white pith.
3. Dehydrate the peelings until crisp (this can take 4-6 hours depending on what method you use).
4. Blitz up the crispy lemon peels in a kitchen whizz.
5. The result is lemon zest powder/granule/flakes that you can store in an airtight container.

Much like anything you choose to dehydrate and powder (such as my Powdered Leafy Greens) you’ll find a whole lot of produce is reduced to a small handful. So for example, more than 50 lemons produced several cups of dehydrated powder.

Once the zest was removed from the lemon and the dehydrator was in fully swing, I then juiced the peeled lemons, sieved the juice to remove any pith or pips, then froze the pure juice for another day. I had previously frozen lemon juice in ice-cube containers, but due to the sheer volume of juice at hand, I decided to freeze ‘2 cups’ at a time in a zip-lock bag.

How do you use Dehydrated Lemon Zest?

Simply, use it just as you would fresh lemon zest: in baking, icing, over roasted or sauteed vegetables, over fish…you name it! You can make your own lemon pepper, citrus sugar, or add it to salad dressings. YUM!