Is This Really the Best Way to Cut a Lime for the Most Juice?

Trying to get the most juice out of limes can be tough. We have a whole bunch of tricks on the site for how to get the job done, including rolling limes and putting them in the microwave. I thought I had seen it all until a post popped up on Reddit, which includes an image that indicates we should be cutting our limes in a different way to get the most juice. Have you tried this? Does it actually make a difference? I needed to find out.

The above video, which has been watched over 1,500,000 times, indicates that this technique for cutting a lime actually works. I was a little confused about what to do with the middle piece of lime, but the video shows that you should twist the lime like a towel to get the most amount of liquid.

Armed with two limes with the same weight (3.3 ounces), I decided to try both methods to see which one produced the most lime juice. I did not do anything special before squeezing them for juice — no rolling, no microwave. I squeezed both limes into jam jars I had around my house, which both weigh 6.75 ounces.

I cut the first lime like you might normally do. I squeezed the lime with my bare hands until I could no longer get any juice and got a total of 1.1 ounces of juice.

I cut the second lime like the one you see in the image on Reddit, which produces five segments of lime to squeeze. The little segments were easy to squeeze, although they were a little harder to hold onto. The middle segment was not easy to wring like a towel, as shown in the video. A ton of the fleshy part of the lime fell into the jam jar as I was squeezing. This method only produced .75 ounces of lime juice.

Conclusion: No, this weird lime-cutting trick does not produce more juice.

Sorry, Reddit.