How to Juice Lilikoi, the Hawaiian Passion Fruit

So, you are lucky enough to live where you can grow lilikoi fruit, not just the beautiful flower. Now what? How do you get the small amount of that liquid gold juice out without having to purchase hugely expensive equipment?

When I picked my first 5 gallon paint bucket full of lilikoi, I cut the lilikoi in half, spooned out the flesh, and put the seeds and juice into a large bowl. Then, I would take about a cup at a time and put it in a strainer with a fine mesh screen. I would use a spoon, rubbing back and forth over and over; trying to get as much of the juice out as possible. This was a very slow, time consuming, and not very rewarding, process.

Next, I tried putting all the contents into a nut milk bag. I would hang the bag over a bowl from one of our kitchen cupboards and let the juice drain out. When the draining slowed, I would squeeze the heck out of the remaining contents to get every last drop of that lovely lilikoi puree. This was better than the first method, but was still time consuming. My forearms would get so sore from squeezing and squeezing.

Then, I had the bright idea to use my Champion juicer. The juicer worked great; but it ground up the seeds, making the juice a mucky brown color. Yuck! One of the beauties of Da Vine Foods lilikoi products is its natural color. I couldn’t have the mucky brown color in my products. It looked unpalatable.

My final idea, and the method I prefer to use for small batches, with minimal equipment at home, is to cut the top off of the lilikoi and put all of the inner contents into a freezer bag. The lilikoi juice is in a membrane that is around the seed, when I freeze the contents of the bag, that membrane pops and releases the juice. I then defrost the lilikoi and put 1 cup at a time into a potato ricer and squeeze the juice into a bowl. This is still labor intensive, but I can do it in multiple steps with stopping time in between. It seems like the best way, to me, for both clean up and labor time. The potato ricer has a long handle which gives me leverage, allowing me to get more juice out of each batch.

This way I get the maximum amount of juice and I am able to maintain the beautiful golden color. My hands don’t get tired like they did using the nut milk bag. It seems like a win win to me.

Do you have another way that you extract the juice from the lilikoi at home? Email me and let me know how you do it.

Of course, there is always the easy way out; order our Lilikoi Wai. It is 100% Passion Fruit puree. There is no water added and most importantly, no sugar added. It is pure!