Picking Lemons For Italian Meals

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Anne with Expert Village and I want to give you a couple of tips on selecting a good lemon for juicing. When I go to the market, I look for a nice juicy soft lemon that I know I am going to us for juicing. Either one of these are great. When you get a lemon, you want to make sure it's got blemish free for the most part. When you are juicing it, it doesn't really matter because you are not doing a presentation with it. I take a lemon and I am going to give it some pressure and roll it back and forth against the cutting board and that is going to bring all the juices up closer to the surface and it is going to be fantastic. It feels nice and squishy. Now a little bit earlier, I chose a lemon that has a firmer and more uniform consistency for zesting. Lemon zest looks like this and it is a great finish for appetizers and meals and additions to sauces. Since I've already used this lemon, I don't want to waste good fruit because I like fruit. I am going to take the lemon and even though it is a little firmer than I would like, I am going to give it that extra strong pressure and make sure those juices are nice and closer to the top of the rind. This is my secret by the way. You don't need to have a juicer, you don't need a strainer, you don't need anything. You should take a knife, you are going to make a nice big incision, like an x. X marks the spot. This is great technique I use when I cater too. I can recycle the fruit that I've used, lemon, lime or orange and I can use every bit of it. Nothing gets wasted. See that nice cut. You can already see the juices coming to is. So I just take it and give it a nice big herculean squeeze as this is a really firm lemon. Look at all that gorgeous juice. Okay so you may get a seed or two. You can easily peck those out with a knife or a spoon. But look done, all the juice you needed. Just wring it out like a towel or a sponge. That is a lot of lemon juice to yield from one big lemon that might have otherwise gotten thrown away after you used it for the zest. So don't waste your produce. Produce is good to you. That's it, lemon juice done. "