If you want to know how much juice each lemon will yield, measure various sizes.
The small lemon yield 40 ml of juice, which is about 1.35 oz.
Knowing that helps you determine whether or not you have enough citrus for the recipe. To find out, try different sizes… Small, medium and large, and check which one yield the most juice.
Measuring lemon juice by size
Or skip weighing them and just go by eye: How do they look next to each other on a cutting board? That’s usually a good clue about their diameters, too.
Cut each lemon in half, then squeeze the juice into a clear measuring cup. Twist hard, until there isn’t another drop left. It is messy business. If you’re not careful, some will splatter onto your hands.
You cut each lemon in half and squeeze the juice into a clear measuring cup. You should of twist firmly to extract every drop. It is messy work because juice splatters if you are not careful.
A cup that has both ounce and milliliter (mL) measurements is necessary so you can easily read your results. First, you start with the little lemon, which is one of the beginning steps.
That’s right: A small lemon produce only 40 ml, or about 1.35 oz., of juice. That’s on the low side but no great shocker, since smaller fruits contains less liquid.
A medium lemon provides 50 ml, or approximately 1.69 oz. That’s an additional ten milliliters over the small one, meaning that bigger lemons results in more volume in the glass.
For example, the big lemon yields ~2.2 oz of juice (65 ml), compared to about 1.69 oz for the medium lemon (50 ml). The bigger lemon has more juice, and that’s a sizable amount.
The medium lemon yields 50 ml, or roughly 1.69 oz.
The bottom line is that these measurements are accurate and you’ll want to take note right now. As it turns out, lemon yield is related to its size (go figure).
When recipes specify “the juice of one lemon,” they never say what kind of lemon. It’s ambiguous. Now you have a fix for that problem. No more guessing the amount of juice from your lemon.
It’s simple science that yields predictable results. No fancy scientific laboratory required here; just a cup and a cutting board will do. More juice means bigger fruit. It is simple.
The numbers don’t lie. Forget peeling back lemons only to discover they’re halfway empty: The numbers make things clear.