How to Juice a Lemon With or Without a Juicer

Lemon juice is a type of citrus juice with an acidic, sour taste. You can expect about three to five tablespoons of lemon juice from the average lemon. While lemon trees sometimes take nearly five years to begin producing fruit, they can turn out quite a few bushels of the fruits per year once they’ve reached full maturity. After that point, you can squeeze the juice out of the lemon fruits to make lemon juice.

Lemon juice alone will taste tart, but it can complement a multitude of savory and sweet dishes if you pair it with other ingredients. Consider these five uses for lemon juice:

1. 1. Add lemon juice to ice cream. Balance the innate sweetness of ice cream with the tart sourness of lemon juice. Next time you plan to make some homemade ice cream, think about using recipes that allow for you to add a lemon base or even just a slight tang. You can always come up with your own ice cream variations, too.
2. 2. Combine lemon and lime juices. Lemon and lime juices work just as well in concert as they do separately to add flavor to beverages (for example, lemon-lime soda) and foods. Try pairing lemon juice with other citrusy liquids like grapefruit or orange juice for a unique beverage.
3. 3. Mix lemon juice with hot water. Adding a squeeze of lemon juice to hot water or tea is a common home remedy for sore throats. The warmed beverage—like the fruit that lemon juice comes from—contains high amounts of vitamin C, a common ingredient in throat lozenges.
4. 4. Store lemon juice in ice cube trays. Pour the juice from a lemon into ice cube trays. Store the tray in the freezer and wait for the chill to turn the juice into solid ice. Now, rather than squeezing a fresh lemon into your water, you can simply use the frozen cubes to give your drink a lemon tang.
5. 5. Use as a seasoning. Home cooks can add lemon juice into dressings or sauces or use it, along with the lemon zest, as a stand-alone seasoning. This can spruce up salads, meat dishes, and any other recipes that you think might benefit from a sour taste and acidic flavor.

You can get a lot of lemon juice out of your citrus fruits by using a well-designed juicer. Follow these four steps to ensure you squeeze out the most juice possible:

1. 1. Microwave frozen lemons. This is only worth doing if you’ve been storing your lemons in a refrigerator or freezer—even then, you should only do it if you can’t afford to spare a lot of prep time. Squeezing lemons at room temperature is much easier than juicing them frozen. But if you don’t want to wait for them to thaw or warm up naturally, just microwave the whole lemons (not cut) for about fifteen or twenty seconds.
2. 2. Roll the lemons on a hard surface. Use your countertop or cutting board to roll the lemons before juicing them. This loosens up the membranes and ripens them further. Without this step in the process, you might not get all the juice you can out of the fruits.
3. 3. Use a citrus juicer. Cut your lemons in half widthwise or lengthwise, depending on the citrus reamer’s design. Place one lemon half on top of your citrus press. Rotate the lemon on top of it—it should catch the lemon seeds and pith in its strainer and allow the juice to fall into the cup below.
4. 4. Store leftover lemons. If you have leftover lemons, especially if you’ve cut them open, store them in an airtight container or plastic bag in your refrigerator or freezer. This will allow you to get the most juice possible from your fruits over a sustained period of time. If you store them at room temperature, they have a much shorter shelf life than they would otherwise.

If you don’t want to cut lemons or use a juicer, there’s another straightforward and clean way to get a similar amount of juice from your fruits without having to cut the lemon peel itself. Use a skewer or toothpick to drive a deep hole into the non-stem end of the lemon rind. After you pull this out, all you have to do is squeeze your lemon above a receptacle and watch as a stream of fresh juice releases without any additional effort or mess.

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