Channel your lemon twist!

That last post got me to thinking about cocktails and perhaps you, like me, have been consistently stymied by achieving perfect lemon twists for your martini?

In the past, when I’ve needed a lemon twist, I just used my vegetable peeler to get a nice fat swath (see below), then sliced that fat lemon peel into presentable slim submission.  To get the “twist” out of it I’d wrap the finished product around a meat skewer and squeeze it tight to form it (…think of a curling iron’s action).

‘Lots of work!  Did you know they make a tool for the perfect lemon twist?  I didn’t.  But now we both do!  It’s called a channel knife (that’s it right down there).  Just whittle it around the circumference of the lemon and it slices out a nice channel of zest, already twisted thanks to the natural shape of the lemon.  Gorgeous!

You may still want to help it a bit to make it even more exaggeratedly spiraled.  I do.  But then, I often get exaggeratedly spiraled myself when drinking martinis.