How Much Juice Is in a Lime? (About 2 Tablespoons)

Limes are the fruit that punishes you for trusting the recipe. A curry asks for the juice of two limes and you end up with one limp tablespoon, or a margarita asks for 30ml and you have squeezed four. The fruit does not care about your recipe.

So here is the range, measured rather than guessed, and the handful of things that quietly change it.

Typical yield per lime

The Tahitian lime — the big, thick-skinned green one sold loose in Australian supermarkets — is a different species from the little key lime used in Florida and in classic key lime pie. If a recipe came from an American source and says "juice of four limes", it may well mean key limes, which is about two of ours.

What changes the yield

Three things, in this order of impact:

• Temperature. A lime straight from the fridge gives noticeably less juice than one at room temperature. Ten seconds in a microwave, or a few minutes in a bowl of warm water, loosens the juice sacs.
• Pressure before cutting. Roll the lime hard on the bench with your palm until it softens slightly. This breaks the internal membranes so the juice releases instead of staying trapped.
• Skin thickness. Thick-skinned limes — often the shinier, more perfect-looking ones — are all pith and very little juice. A lime that feels heavy for its size is the one to buy.

That heaviness is the only reliable freshness cue limes offer, because the skin colour tells you almost nothing. Green limes can be fully ripe and yellow limes can be past their best. This is the same trap as oranges that turn green again on the tree — rind colour is a cosmetic signal, not a ripeness one.

How many limes to buy

A quick rule that covers most cooking: one lime per two servings for a dressing or a drink, and two limes for a curry or a marinade for four people. If you are juicing for a batch of cocktails, buy a third more than the arithmetic suggests — the last lime of the bag is always dry.

Bottled lime juice is a false economy in flavour but fine for cooking. It also comes with a fixed recommendation of about 15ml per lime in most conversion charts, which is why dishes made with it taste sharper than the ones made with fresh fruit.

Storing and using the juice

Juice keeps two or three days covered in the fridge, and freezes well in an ice cube tray — one cube is about 15ml, half a lime, which makes it easy to grab exactly what a recipe needs. Roll the lime before juicing, cut it across the middle rather than lengthwise, and squeeze cut-side up so the pips stay in the fruit.