Dear Heloise: I use lemons a lot for the zesty taste that they give a number of dishes. I was going to make a recipe that called for the lemon zest as well as fresh squeezed lemon juice, but my lemons ...

Lemon zest is not the same as lemon peel. It's the super-thin yellow rind of the lemon. To obtain the zest, you must be sure that you separate it from the pith, the white layer between the rind and ...

To zest a lemon without a zester, you can use a Microplane, vegetable peeler, box grater, or a knife.