How to Cut Lemons

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Anne Apra and I want to share with you some tips I like to call catering tips 101. Here's another tip for lemons. Lemons are such a lovely ingredient in all kinds of foods. Give them a little nice squeeze and a roll on to bring all the juices up to the rind. Now later on I'm going to be making a dish where I'm going to need lemon zest. So thinking ahead I use my wonderful lemon zester to create some zest ahead of time before I juice these lemons. When you're making dishes at home, it's good to think ahead of all kinds of ingredients that you're going to need and prep it all at one time. For example, I need lemon juice, I need lime juice and I need orange juice and I need zest from all of them. So first I'm going to zest all of the fruit and reserve all those beautiful pieces on the side in a little bowl and then I'm going to juice them all. That way I have a lot of product from my one little expensive fruit. Okay. There's some nice zest. I'm going to set them aside and juicing lemons is pretty simple. Remember give them a good rub. You cut them in half as many as you can. Now citrus is seasonal in most parts of the world. I live in California so we get pretty good citrus all year long. We're very lucky. Grab yourself a handy dandy juicer. You're just going to press down evenly and give it a good squeeze. I give it a little extra squeeze afterwards because lemons are expensive and I like to get as much juice as I can from them. Alright. It's good to get a juicer that has a catcher that catches all the seeds so you don't have to do double work and I don't mind if a little bit of pulp gets in my lemon juice because I think it adds a little texture and flavor. You can add lemon juice to sauces, to salad dressings. You can use the zest in garnishing to make a dish look pretty. Especially one that you already have lemon in it. Just tells you people eating the foods that lemon is in it. We're going to talk about garnishing a little later. So sometimes I'll reserve rinds of lemon or the ends or I'll cut beautiful circles and I'll use them to garnish a dish. Especially my rosemary lemon chicken, which we're going to make later. Alright. You're going to take your juice and I'm going to just measure it out. I've got about a cup or so and that's out of about four lemons. Alright. One little tip I like to do; if I have extra lemon juice, especially if it's seasonal, I'm going to fill an ice cube tray and I'm going to seal it really tight with this wonderful gadget. You can find some at your local grocery stores and I'm going to freeze it so that you can have lemon juice all year round."