Juicing Citrus Fruit

In the past I have heard that microwaving a citrus fruit before juicing would allow you to get more juice out of it. After a little research, I found a plausible explanation for this, the microwaves break down the cell membranes so that the juices are able to flow more freely. I accepted this as fact until I read elsewhere that warming the fruit in the oven for a few minutes would have the same effect.

This made me suspicious, maybe it wasn't the breaking down of the cell walls, but rather, just the heat was somehow releasing the juices. All of this started to make me think, the information on the internet was sketchy, only claiming I would get more juice, never how it worked or even how much more I would get.

At this point, I realized that I would be hard pressed to discover how it worked on my own, so that question is still somewhat of a mystery to me. However, testing to see how much more juice I could get was a very easy and simple process.

For the purposes of this experiment I did not try the oven method, only because the information I could find on it said it took a few minutes, where as the microwave would take a few seconds. As such, if the microwave method worked, I would never bother with the oven method, only because it takes so much longer.

 For this experiment, I gathered two fine citrus specimens (I had planned on adding a Grapefruit and Lime to the line up, but I didn't really want their juices). I am going to talk about the steps I took on the Lemon, they were the same for the Orange, I just didn't photo document it.

 I tried to split the Lemon lengthwise so that each half weighed exactly the same. I came pretty close on the Lemon and almost exactly on the Orange, so I believe it is safe to say I succeeded. I then subjected one half of the Lemon to 10 seconds on Hi in the microwave. I haven't tested with other powers and time spans. I may do this in the future, but I have no plans to do so. The other half I did nothing too.

I don't have a citrus fruit juicer, so I used the next best thing, the back side of a spoon to juice both halves into pre-weighed custard cups. Using the tare option of my scale, I was able to measure the weight difference between the juice/pulp/seeds of each method. I then strained the juice and measured it separately. The results are shown below.

Lemon

Initial Weight of the full Lemon = 172 g

Microwaved half weighed = 79 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 30 g, the Juice alone weighed = 24 g

Traditional half weighed = 92 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 33 g, the Juice alone weighed = 22 g

 

Orange

Initial Weight of the full Orange = 188 g

Microwaved half weighed = 93 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 52 g, the Juice alone weighed = 18 g

Traditional half weighed = 94 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 52, the Juice alone weighed = 13 g

 

To break it down, when I Microwaved the Lemon, I was able to get 30.3% by weight as juice, compared to 23.9% when juiced with nothing special done to it. That is an improvement of 6.4% of juice from a Lemon, by microwaving the Lemon for only 10 seconds. Again, I haven't tried other power levels or time spans, so it may get better, or it may get worse. All I can say is that for a Lemon placed in a microwave for 10 seconds on Hi, you can expect to see a 6.4% increase in the volume of juice produced.

As for the Orange, the Microwaved half came out to 19.4% juice and the Traditional method produced 13.8%. Again a net benefit, albeit only a 5.6% increase. As I mentioned with the Lemons, all we can conclude is that you can get more juice my microwaving on Hi for 10 seconds.

The next logical step would be to test multiple power levels and time spans to determine the optimal time and power level to get the most juice from the citrus fruits. You would need multiple samples at each level to create a proper statistical model for this to work. This is my science disclaimer.

 

On another note, from the small sample I had, I noticed that the juice weighed 1 gram per 1 milliliter roughly.