Lemons. I can't live without them. I love all things lemon and I use them in way one or another every day. A little squeeze of lemon in my Coke Zero or in a glass of iced tea. Delicious. Some fresh lemon juice added to the mix of any of the standard lunch salads; tuna, chicken or seafood. I enjoy a glass of sparkling water with the juice of one lemon and a half teaspoon of baking soda every morning. I have a recipe for a lemon curd pie I will share with you in the coming days. So lemons play a pretty big part in my life.
To start with, I use regular lemons that you find in the bin in the produce department of your local grocery store. I do not buy organic lemons. I do not buy Meyer lemons. I buy good old fashioned lemons. I choose the lemons that look best to me. You may be tempted to just pick up one of those pre-packaged mesh bags of lemons if you are in a hurry. Do not. I have done that a couple times and I am always disappointed. The lemons are small and many times you lose one or two because they have begun to mold. Better to choose each lemon individually from the bin. It really doesn't take that much longer.
We will first start with the lemon juicer. Slice one lemon in half around the circumference and place one half at a time on the center post of the juicer. You simply rotate the lemon around the rigid center post until you have extracted all the juice and seeds from that half, then do the same with the other half.
In this picture you can see all of the seeds that were captured in the top of the juicer as we extracted the juice.
From that one lemon, we have about two tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice in the glass container that makes up this juicer set.
Here are our two lemon halves after extracting the juice.
Here, another lemon cut in half around the circumference of the fruit. For juicing, you always cut the fruit around the circumference. You cut wedges of lemon from the stem end to the bottom to place in cocktails. This is very important information to know!!
This time, using the wooden lemon reamer, we begin to extract the juice from our lemon halves. Same sort of thing. You simply place the point of the wooden reamer into the center of the lemon and using force between both hands, move the lemon reamer back and forth with one hand while squeezing the lemon with the other.
And here is the extracted juice using the wooden reamer. Decidedly less juice I would say and then there is the issue of seeds in the juice.
Of course, you could do as I did here in another test using the wooden juice reamer and filter the juice through a strainer into a vessel of your choice thereby keeping the lemon seeds out of the juice. This seems like a lot of extra work to me.
This time I used an old-fashion glass. Still looks like less juice using the reamer than the juicer.
For comparison, here is a picture of the two lemons after having the juice extracted in both ways. On the left is how they looked after using the manual juicer and on the right, using the reamer. Not a great deal of difference, however, in my opinion, the manual juicer extracts more juice than the reamer. It is also a cleaner process. The design of the juicer top keeps the seeds out of the juice and is less complicated than using a strainer and vessel when using the reamer. There is also less time spent cleaning with the manual juicer. The seeds should be emptied from the juicer top into the kitchen trash can. Never down the sink, especially if you have a garbage disposal.
I am not saying that I'll never use the wooden reamer, but for now, the little orange topped juicer is my juicer of choice.
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