Big squeeze: A pressing issue for orange juice

Then I got some Valencias and juiced a couple on both this Amazing Hulk of a press and on a standard electric juicer. Everybody who tasted it agreed that the Hulk’s juice was definitely sweeter, even more aromatic and flavorful, it seemed. I repeated the experiment twice and got the same result in blind tastings. I even juiced some navel oranges, though they aren’t known for great juice, and still the juice from the press was sweeter.

What could explain this? The juicing method, right? So I asked researcher Renee Goodrich of the University of Florida, an expert in the science of orange juice. She cast cold water on this theory, suggesting that flavor would be more affected by “the types of oranges people used, the general care and sanitation that was used in the kitchen, as well as how long people kept the juice around after squeezing.”

Okay, there was an expert’’s opinion. I couldn’t say I was keen on that crack about our kitchen, though.

Next I contacted Paul Breslin, a specialist in taste perception at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, and asked him whether scraped-off bits of bitter peel might make juice taste less sweet. “It is certainly possible,” he allowed. But he thought this explanation would be more likely if a large quantity of sugar was necessary to make two samples of orange juice taste equally sweet.

Food science writer Harold McGee pointed out that oranges aren’t equally sweet all the way through. Blossom end juice can be more than 12 percent sugar while the stem end is only 8 percent, definitely on the sour side.

That I could certainly look into. All you need to find the sugar content of fruit juice is a little gadget called a refractometer, which looks like a microscope eyepiece stuck into a clarinet mouthpiece. You put some juice on the clarinet end and peep through the other. Like magic, a line on a scale tells you the percentage of the solution that’s sugar.

So the next day I brought in eight more pounds of Valencias to the Test Kitchen. To correct for the greater sweetness of the blossom ends, I took pairs of oranges and cut them in half, then switched them, juicing the blossom end of one together with the stem end of the other.

Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam — I juiced five pairs of oranges and tested the juice with a refractometer. And in every case, the sugar reading was 1.5 to 2 percentage points higher in the juice from the press.

LAT-WP