Purely Lemon?

For those of you who have been keep­ing up with our posts, my ulti­mate goal has been to find pure ingre­di­ents to use in our fla­vors.  I often won­der if this is too much to ask… it has actu­ally been com­i­cally difficult.

For instance, lemon pow­der– when I thought I had this all fig­ured out, after we sent out a bunch of test kits, and after we tested it mul­ti­ple times, I found out that this ingre­di­ent wasn’t as whole­some as I thought.  Our pure lemon pow­der was NOT pure…it not only con­tained sil­ica diox­ide but it also con­tained corn syrup as well! (Don’t even get me started on corn syrup) So for the past 5 weeks I have been try­ing to find pure lemon juice pow­der, and it’s been impos­si­ble, so I am now aim­ing for pure lemon pow­der. Freeze –dried or dehy­drated, I don’t care what it is, but I just need it to be in the form of pow­der, and I need it to be 100% pure.

A few com­pa­nies have told me that you can’t freeze– dry a liq­uid to become a solid with­out adding a cer­tain solid, such as corn syrup or another agent.  Another com­pany told me that this wasn’t the case, but that they would have to add another agent to make sure the pow­der is free flow­ing and doesn’t clump.  Another com­pany told me that they could get pure lemon juice pow­der for us, but when they dug deeper, they found out that their man­u­fac­ture added 3% sil­ica diox­ide. Finally, another com­pany told me that I could place a spe­cial order, but a min run would be about 10,000 dol­lars, and we obvi­ously don’t have that kind of money to be toss­ing around and exper­i­ment­ing with.

I did how­ever just get off the phone with our sea salt sup­plier and they said that one of their salts con­tains the pow­der of a whole lemon, and that it is 100% free of any agents, addi­tives, chemicals, preservatives etc. Since I am neurotic,and I have to be, I asked her to dou­ble check with the owner of the com­pany and the com­pany that sup­plies the lemon pow­der.  This lemon pow­der is not actu­ally freeze –dried or dehy­drated.  I will never know how it’s specif­i­cally made because it’s pro­pri­ety infor­ma­tion, but I don’t really care.  Again, all I care about is that it’s made with nat­ural ingre­di­ents– that it con­sists of 100% pure lemon.  I should be get­ting a sam­ple soon and will let you know how it tastes, and if there are sus­pi­cious ingre­di­ents on the spec sheets once I receive them. I am cross­ing my fin­gers that this is the one… because I am run­ning out of options!

PS. we are in crunch mode.  My goal is to have a fin­ished prod­uct in about 6 weeks. Coul­ter says this is impos­si­ble– but I say oth­er­wise. Wish us luck!
Foot­note: Lemon pow­der doesn’t make for a good photo so I chose a photo of our fresh salsa ingredients!