ISO: Re: ISO: Lemon bread/lemon recipes

If you go to http://www.askjeeves.com and do a search for lemon recipes, you will come up with many.

Here is a recipe for Lemon Bread and how to make zest. I freeze my zest in strips and sometime I grate it and freeze it that way also.

Apple Lane Inn

Aptos, California

Specialty Recipe

Lemon Bread

Ingredients
6 tablespoons butter
1 cup sugar
2 beaten eggs
1 grated lemon rind
1-1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup half and half

Cream together butter and sugar. Add eggs and rind. Add half and half to egg mixture. Sift together dry ingredients
and add to egg mix. Pour into greased loaf pan. Bake in 350 F oven for 40-50 minutes or until pick comes out clean.
Cool for 10 minutes. Punch holes in bread with fork. Slowly pour topping over bread. Cool completely in pan.

Topping:Mix together 1/2 cup of sugar and juice from 1 lemon.

Zesting

The zest is the colored, outer part of citrus peel, where most of the flavor oils come from. The white part of the peel,
or pith, is bitter. Recipes which call for "grated peel" generally mean only the zest.

To zest a citrus fruit, it should be scraped with a zester, with the resulting peel
containing no bitter white pith. This means not scraping over a region previously
scraped. The resulting julienne of zest can be used as-is, or chopped, according to the
usage. In most cases, the finely chopped julienne is suitable when "grated zest" is
called for.

In some situations, the presence of some bitter pith is irrelevant or even interesting.
In this case, it would be appropriate to carefully peel the zest from the fruit, even with
minimal bits of pith attached. Using a sharp paring knife, slice a spiral of the zest
from the fruit, including pith according to taste.

An extremely convenient substitution for zest is the citrus zest oil itself, which is available in a number of retail and
mail-order stores, made by the Boyajian company. They produce lemon, orange, and lime oils (in addition to flavored
"regular" oils, and some natural extracts, and various other gourmet items). Only 1/4 teaspoon of one of these oils,
scant or generous according to the size of the citrus substituted for, will substitute for the zest. When you only need
the zest, this is not only far more convenient, but may be less expensive.