How Much Juice You Can Get From One Lemon

Lemon juice is the perfect compliment to countless flavors running the gauntlet from sweet to spicy. Whether it is for adding a touch of extra flavor to pasta or mixing a paper plane cocktail, lemon juice is a key ingredient to many dishes and beverages. Naturally, acquiring such a critical ingredient comes with some ambiguity, at least when it comes to juicing fresh fruit. Beyond just eyeballing it and hoping for the best, you can better estimate how much juice can be drawn from one lemon. While an average lemon can produce 2-3 tablespoons of lemon juice, it's safer to assume that it will produce 2 tablespoons of lemon — better to have too much lemon juice than not enough, after all! 

There are a few different approaches you can take to harvest those precious tablespoons of juice from the lemons. One of the most intuitive and hands-on ways to collect lemon juice is to hand-squeeze the lemon. This can be done by squeezing halved or quartered lemons over a sieve to catch any seeds or errant bits of pulp. Alternatively, you can peel the lemon before squeezing the entire fruit over a bowl. Using a juice press or citrus reamer on halved lemons will yield lots of lemon juice with less effort than what's required by the bare hands method.

Just as there is a strategy to picking the best avocados from the supermarket, there is a way to go home with the juiciest lemons on the shelf. When picking lemons from the produce section, applying a light amount of pressure will help determine which fruits will produce more juice. Those fruits with a bit of give will likely have thinner skins and more juice-producing flesh than firmer lemons.

When the lemons have made it from the supermarket to your kitchen, ensuring they are stored properly will help you harvest more juice from this fruit. Lemons will lose their moisture as they are kept in the fridge, so seal them in a zip-top style of bag to keep them from drying out in the refrigerator.

When you remove them from the fridge, let them sit until they reach room temperature. That's because colder lemons will be harder to squeeze and will subsequently produce less juice. Once the lemons reach room temperature, roll them on a hard surface while applying gentle pressure to help soften up the flesh and release more juice.