Favorite Kitchen Tools: Glass Citrus Juicer

Welcome to Full of Beans and our on-going series: Kitchen Gadget of the Week. If you have seen the previous posts you know that we are really working to reduce our use of plastic and to utilize durable, well-made items. This week’s post is following along with Kitchen Gadget of the Week #3: Glass Citrus Juicers!

What it Does and Why We Like It

A citrus juicer makes extracting as much juice as possible from citrus fruit quick and easy. The best ones allow you to press the fruit against the reamer part to get the juice from all the edges and corners while also catching (most) of the seeds, and have a pouring spout. It’s easy to find all sorts of citrus juicers, including big citrus presses, electric ones, and (of course) hundreds of plastic ones. We prefer more natural materials over plastic, and manual over powered appliances for simple applications like juicing fruit.

The process is simple: cut the fruit in half, place the open end against the top of the juicer (this part is called the reamer), press down and twist back and forth while watching all the juice come flowing out. Easy! Manual citrus juicers, like our pair, have had a place in kitchens, all over, for generations. They are the perfect tool for getting fresh citrus juice for recipes and refreshing glasses of lemonade.

Our citrus juicers are both glass and we have a small and a medium. The two sizes are perfect for pretty much all the citrus juicing that we do and the glass construction is solid, as well as good-looking. We were fortunate to find them on a shelf in a local thrift/antique shop which makes us appreciate them all the more.

What Is Our Fav Recipe To Use This For?

Well, juicing a lemon and adding it to a nice glass of ice water, or making margaritas from scratch, are wonderful uses of a citrus juicer. But our favorite recipe that causes us to use one of our juicers is definitely our Hummus. The fresh lemon juice in that recipe is key to the delicious flavor. Try it out!

Easy Hummus Recipe for the Best Hummus Ever

Where Can You Get It?

As mentioned above, we found our lovely set at a local thrift/antique shop. The recycle/reuse dynamic of picking up kitchen tools at a thrift shop really appeals to us. So, if you have shops like that near you, or you happen on one, drop in and see what you can find. We have discovered all sorts of wonderful items that way (some of which may appear in an upcoming Kitchen Gadget post). But, we have found really nice versions of glass citrus juicers on a number of reliable sites:

• This one at Amazon is actually quite similar to one we owned years ago (a depression-era green glass one)
• While we use our’s for small citruses, such as lemons and limes, you can get more ambitious juicing oranges and grapefruit with this large capacity version
• This wonderfully retro version even comes with a measuring cup that catches the juice!