5 Things to Crush, Crumble, and Smash With Your Citrus Squeezer

If you're like me, then you often times forget to close your brown sugar box to make it air-tight. When that happens, the moisture in the brown sugar evaporates and it hardens. Before I discovered this trick, I used to take my giant block of hardened brown sugar and shave off grains with a knife. Needless to say, that was laborious and just downright inefficient. Now, I break off a lime-size chunk and stick it in my citrus squeezer, whose powerful squeezing capabilities will turn that hardened sugar into sand-like grains with just one squeeze.

If you don't have a mortar and pestle but you need to grind up some peppercorns or any other whole spice, you can do a rough grind with your trusty citrus squeezer. It may not grind your spices into fine powder, but you'll have a coarse spice that you can easily use in your cooking.

Don't have a food processor? No problem. If you're making a graham cracker crust, you can use a citrus juicer to crumble the crackers and then manually mix in the butter and sugar. Not owning a certain piece of equipment should never keep you from making something, especially if that something involves a graham cracker crust.

If you're making guacamole but for some reason you hate manually smashing avocado with a spoon, you can always throw it into your citrus squeezer to get the job done. All you need to do is scoop and squeeze (no smashing required).

Again, if you don't have a food processor, you can still make perfectly crumbly bread crumbs. Just put croutons or crispy, hardened bread into your citrus squeezer and voilà! It's ready to go into your meatball mixture.