I made some strawberry lemonade concentrate the other day (3 quarts!), and was left with quite a pile of lemon rinds after they were juiced. I didn't want to throw them away, but after using some to clean the garbage disposal, wasn't sure what else I could do with them. Then I remembered, lemon zest!
I cut, using a paring knife, the zest (the lemon part only, not the thick white membranee) off of each lemon rind. I lined my dehydrator trays with parchment paper (and one with the fruit roll tray that came with it) and spread the zest evenly across the trays. I set it to 130 degrees, per my dehydrator instructions for fruit and let it dry over night. The next morning I had nicely dried lemon zest.
I used a coffee grinder to grind them all up. I would suggest you use a new one, or one that is only used for spices and not coffee, or you risk having coffee flavored lemon zest. I ground mine up rather finely with the coffee grinder. There were a few larger chunks that didn't grind down, but I wasn't too worried about them because the zest is most often sprinkled over salmon in our house.
In the end, I ended up with a half pint jar of lemon zest! The last time I bought lemon zest at the store, it was about $7 for a small bottle. I ended up with half a pint jar out of something I was going to put in the trash!
No comments:
Post a Comment