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The question “What is lemon zest?” confronts every man when he first sets out to cook and I’m convinced women named it that just to keep men out of their kitchen domain.

“Anything I can do to help dear?”

“Well, you could zest that lemon for me.”

“…I don’t think that’s legal in this state.”

“Never mind, I’ll just do it all myself.”

But it’s really not that complicated or gay. Let the fat man lay some knowledge on you:

The zest of a lemon(or any citrus fruit) is the quarter milimeter at the very top of the skin. That might not seem like much, but there’s a lot of flavor packed in there. In fact, about 80% of the lemon flavor is in the zest. Remember the time your girlfriend made lemon squares and they tasted like gelatinous yellow sugar? That’s because she skipped the step of getting the lemon zest.

If you don’t believe me, hold a lemon up close sometime. You can actually see all the oil in the skin, that’s where the flavor is. It’s the money shot of your citrus.

However, there’s kind of a dangerous zone right underneath the zest. It’s called the pith, and it tastes about as good as it sounds. You know how when you’re eating an orange you sometimes scrape up that bitter, white crap that makes you hauk luggies for 10 minutes and swear off fruit? That’s the pith.

So the key to zesting is getting the skin with it’s oils and flavors and not getting the pith with it’s aweful and raunch. Toward this end a lot of people buy this useless hunk:

Yeah, a waste of money, time and sanity. But here’s a couple tricks for getting lemon(or lime) zest quick and easy without that null-tool:

• If you have a box grater, you might be able to get away with using the side with the smallest holes. You have to go light to make sure you don’t dig into the pith, but this works pretty well with a little practice.
• You can actually drag a knife blade perpendicular to the skin. this doesn’t get much of the skin off, but it will scrape up a decent amount of the oils. If you’re getting the lemon juice as well, just scrape the skin, squeeze the lemon and then wipe the knife with an empty lemon quarter to get all the good stuff.
• My prefered method is to use a file. A straight up metal file. I’ve always got my Leatherman with me and it does a great job of zesting the lemon. You’ll still have to wipe the oils off though, the same as the knife.
• Failing all that, if you absolutely must buy a lemon zester(or you need the zest but not the juice) then you need something like this:
  

  
  

  Anything that’s stainless steel and uses a microplane. That means really small holes for scraping.

So that answers the questions “What is lemon zest?” and why you should never skip it and gives some easy ways to do it. It doesn’t quite calm the masculinity questions zesting brings up, but you’ll get over it.