Have you ever found a great sale on lemons and wondered if you should get a bunch of them, or if you did, what you would do with them all? Or maybe you wondered how to freeze lemon juice.
I have! In fact, a friend recently gifted us with a bushel box full of lemons. Yes, a bushel box! That’s a lot of potential lemon juice!
We’re doing several things with them (more on that later), but the first thing we wanted to make sure of, was that we had a large quantity of frozen lemon juice stored up for future recipes and lemonades. Bottled juice is great for making easy goat cheese, or buttermilk substitutes, but when it comes to flavoring, fresh squeezed just can’t be beat!
If you’ve never frozen lemon juice before, or even if you have, this is by far the best method I’ve yet to find!
How To Freeze Lemon Juice
Roll your lemons hard on a counter top to kind of break up the insides and make them easier to juice.
- Cut the lemons in half
- Juice them. I’ll be honest; this part is hard, even if you have one of these super-cool Kitchen Aid attachments like my mother-in-law (who graciously let me borrow it).
- Pour your juice into ice cube trays, and freeze.
This part is brilliant! If makes the juice so much more accessible.
- Once the juice is frozen, pop it out of the ice cube trays. The great thing about this is that lemon juice comes out of the ice cube trays a lot easier than frozen water. No need to run hot water over the bottom of the tray!
- Dump the lemon juice cubes into freezer bags and put them back in the freezer.
- Why, you may be wondering, bother with the extra steps of freezing the lemon juice in ice cube trays when it’s so much easier to just pour it straight into freezer bags and be done with it?
Well, it’s pretty simple; this way, when you want a little bit of lemon juice, you can just reach in and grab a cube – you don’t have to thaw an entire bag.
And it’s pre-measured! Standard ice cube trays hold 1 oz. of liquid, which is 2 Tablespoons or 1/8 of a cup. So it’s really easy to get exactly the right amount of lemon juice for your recipe!
So, the next time you see lemons on sale, think about how you can freshly squeezed lemon juice at your fingertips for making lemonade next summer – when lemon prices are much higher!
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Alan Ford says
Rind the lemons first and put in freezer bag. good for flavoring many foods and smoothie’s. good for you too
Mark says
i give lemons away and met a man who just eats them raw, everything minus the seeds.
c says
Great idea! Can you freeze the zest, too?
Mark says
My lemon tree drops enough to fill a 5 gallon bucket every day during its season. I cannot keep up on it and give lots away. I wonder about safety in the freezing. Freezing in silicone is thought safer than plastic, and then are there better qualities of freezer bags? Plastic has different qualities, but even frozen lemon juice is different than water and other frozen things. I’m experimenting with freezing in stainless steel and glass. I read even making fermented tea and brewing in porcelain can degrade walls of porcelain. Just trying to do the best we can with what we have and help others.
Gary says
Thank you for this. I’m a raging alcoholic and my poison is Long Island Iced Tea. Going to a restaurant will cost you between $10.00 – $13.00 per drink. I’m trying to make one for $6.00 and drink 2 a day (300ML alcohol total). Lemons in my area (closest to me) are $.80 and $.96 per lemon. I use 2 lemons in my Long Island Iced Tea recipe. At my rate, I’m spending almost $50.00 per batch on lemons. I’m going to follow your advice!
ChefJohn says
I think it’s a good idea to remove as much air as possible from the bags before re-freezing. It’s surprising how much water (depending on the humidity) is in the air. It’s the air in the bag that creates the icicles that stick to the surface of the cubes and actually dilute the thawed juice and the oxygen in the air also contribute to taste change.
If, like many people, you don’t have a vacuum sealer, an easy trick is to almost completely close the bag, leaving a small ‘hole’ at the end of each seal, then – after breathing out just cover the ‘hole’ with your mouth and breath in! the maximum amount of air will be removed and you can quickly finish sealing the bag.
Remember that there is no contamination – you are breathing in and not possibly passing anything from your breath into the bag.
Another good tip is to write “Lemon Juice” and the date on the bag/s before removing the trays from the freezer so that there is as little chance as possible of the cubes starting to thaw and then sticking together as they re-freeze in the bags. If I have enough room in my freezer (it’s usually pretty full) I put the trays of liquid in (or with0 a baking tray, into the freezer. This way, I can remove the baking tray and one of the juice tray at a time and pop the cubes out onto the ice-cold tray, which minimises the possibility of thawing while the blocks are out of the freezer. This is very handy if you need a certain amount of juice and want to remove a certain number of whole blocks – without having to ‘chisel’ them apart.
dina says
Fabulous idea! I was just about to marie kondo my electric juicer 🙂