Drying lemon.....help

[Pignut]

Ok, I am loving lemon and ginger tea (with honey and a dram on occasion)

I dried a load of ginger in my de-hydrator as I saw some on the cheap in tesco..

I also see lemons cheap in there all the time... Anyone know how to dry these for a tea?

 

[The Big Lebowski]

I would personally just put them on a ceramic plate in front of a warm air blower... Or use your de-hydrator.

A sprinkle of sugar (caster or molasses) before drying should slightly candy them, improving the taste of your brew.

 

[British Red]

The peel dries better than the skin mate.

Makes better tea too

You can dry the whole lot in slices though - just slice thinly and put in the dehydrator

 

[Toddy]

You can sugar dessicate them in thin slices and the resultant syrup's nice on sponge puddings too

BR's spot on about the peel though. If you pare it off as finely as you can and chop it small it can be dried like that (loses a lot of the oil zest that way though) or you can extract the oil (they used to do this with all citrus fruits, just press on it agin something hard and use a sponge to soak up the oil) and add that to you tea leaves. It infuses through them quite nicely.
That said, dried peel left in the tea tin just like we leave a vanilla pod in the caster sugar jar, scents the lot quite nicely

cheers,
Toddy

 

[bilmo-p5]

A spoonful of this ...

 

[salan]

I have successfully dried a whole lemon. I followed what some eastern friends said. Basically I left it in my drawer at work!
After a couple of months, I have a whole dried lemon!
They use them in cooking a lot and when you break into one the whole room fills with lemon.
I didn't do anything special, but did it slowly.I intend to do some more as I believe that they will keep for years providing they are kept dry.
Alan

 

[Pignut]

A spoonful of this ...

View attachment 10673

Thanks all,

Great advice. Tried putting slices in the dehydrator, they just went brown

tried infusing this with Vodka....Eeep

Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Toddy]

I usually end up with the occasional brick hard browned lemon every couple of months, and those end up in the compost heap.......nice one Salan, we'll give that a go instead

cheers,
Toddy

 

[squishy]

I'll have to give this a try, I love dried peel