How To Cut Limes To Extract The Most Juice Possible

Once you've picked out the tastiest limes at the grocery store, there's no reason to waste a single drop! Cutting limes in half or into the all too ubiquitous wedges is an outmoded method to eke the most juice from small, dense limes. Instead, cutting the lime into cheeks plays out to be the bartender-approved technique to ensure the juice is worth the squeeze.

Generally, one lime will yield approximately 2 tablespoons or one ounce of lime juice, sometimes a bit more or less depending upon the size of the lime. When a lime is cut into wedges, you'll be lucky to get one tablespoon. Cutting it into cheeks, or slicing around the core, similar to cutting around the core of an apple, makes each piece infinitely more squeezable by hand, thereby exuding more lime juice.

We often treat our limes like lemons, but they're different enough to warrant an alternate approach. Lemons are oval, while limes are round, almost perfectly spherical, and limes are typically a lot smaller than lemons, a characteristic making cheeks a more optimal cut for juice extraction by hand.

Though we can frequently swap out limes for lemons and vice versa, cutting out the core enables us to get more juice from each squeeze. It's a surprisingly simple technique that will give you more juice for the perfect margarita, a classic pico de gallo, or a homemade key lime pie.