Recipe- When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Homemade Lemon Pepper

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This year I made a bunch of homemade spice mixes and gave them in Modge Podge Spice Jars as Christmas gifts.

One of the spice blends I made was Homemade Lemon Pepper. Since I was a kid, I’ve been addicted to lemon pepper. I love it on just about everything- vegetables (especially corn, broccoli and roasted zucchini and peppers), fish, chicken, steaks. Basically if the flavor needs a bit of brightening a sprinkle of lemon pepper does the trick.

I’ve always bought lemon pepper at the grocery store but when I was trying to decide which spice blends to give I decided to give lemon pepper a try. I’m so glad I did! I had to share the recipe on Sew Creative.

What You Need:

-4 lemons

-1/3 cup of peppercorns

-1 tablespoon of sea salt or kosher salt

-A spice grinder (if you prefer you could grind the pepper with a pepper mill or mortar and pestle).

-A grater

-A cookie sheet

Step 1: Grate the skin off of 4 lemons. You just want the yellow part of the skin. Don’t go so deep that you are grating the white part. I made a double batch so the amount of zest in the photos filled two small mason jars.

Step 2: Spread the lemon zest onto a cookie sheet (I lined mine with parchment paper). Set your oven at it’s lowest setting (mine was at 200). It will take about an hour for your lemon zest to dry out. Keep checking on it and tossing the lemon zest with a fork. The zest on the outskirts of the pile will dry up faster than that which is in the center.

Step 3: When you lemon zest feels dry and slightly crumbly to the touch you know that it is done. It will have shrunken quite a bit and be slightly browned. At this point remove it from the oven.

Step 4: Put 1/3 of a cup of peppercorns and 1 tablespoon of sea salt or kosher salt into your spice grinder.

Note: My dad is on a low salt diet so I only put 1 tablespoon of salt into this. I have seen recipes that call for equal parts salt and pepper. Adjust the salt content to your taste.

Grind until your peppercorns are the consistency that you desire then add your dried lemon zest. Give the grinder 2 or 3 short pulses to incorporate lemon into the salt and pepper mixture. (Alternatively if you don’t have a spice grinder you could use a pepper grinder or mortar and pestle to grind your pepper and salt.)