# subbing for lemon oil



## scottr (Feb 11, 2017)

I happen to have a lot of food-grade dried lavender around and I've been looking for dessert recipes. One limitation: I'm aiming for low-fat, since whatever I make will also be for someone who had their gall bladder removed, meaning they have to limit their fat intake.

So I came across this recipe for Lavender Lemon Angel Food Cake. Looks good, but the recipe also calls for using lemon oil. I don't have lemon oil, and in solving my lavender overstock I don't want to buy something that's basically going to sit around, too.

Poking around online, it looks like I can sub lemon zest for lemon oil, but how much? Part of my question is that this recipe calls for 1 tsp of lemon oil; from what I've seen in similar discussions, that seems like a lot of lemon oil, and maybe they meant lemon extract?


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## dogfood (Mar 3, 2018)

Never used lemon oil for cooking, but use a fair bit of lemon extract "natural flavour"
Ingredients: Alcohol, water, propylene glycol, natural flavour .
It's pretty strong stuff! Much better than typical grocery store/artificial.
Purchase it locally (pseudo bulk) at our local "Famous Foods" in Vancouver, BC

Barring that, I'd use ~2tsp+ of very fine lemon zest..can never have too much lemon! ;-)

BTW..it seems the said recipe uses beaten egg whites...any addition of oil typically crashes any fluffy/beaten egg whites


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## scottr (Feb 11, 2017)

That's part of my question: from what I've read, lemon *oil* is maybe four times stronger than lemon *extract*, which would totally throw off the substitution numbers if they really meant the oil.

From the King Arthur Flour catalog, it says that their lemon oil is "a remarkably intense essence squeezed from the rind of fresh lemons; there's no oil added, just all-natural fruit flavor"; the ingredients for Boyajian Lemon Oil are "Pure lemon oil," nothing else. Pretty intense.


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## harpua (May 4, 2005)

I rarely measure lemon zest; I grate it in until it smells like enough, then I’ll taste it. Like dogfood says, it’s really hard to use too much lemon. I would be more careful with dried lavender flowers. Those can overpower very quickly. 

I used to use lemon oil in cupcakes and it is very strong.


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