One of the things that drew us to our home when we bought it was the amazing back yard. The previous owner had planted this beautiful orange tree which gives us a ton of oranges every January/February. However, this particular variety of oranges has a ton of seeds which makes them not the best for eating on the go and I didn’t want to spend lots of time prepping them for use in other recipes. This year, I was on the hunt for a way to use up all of the oranges and thought hey, let’s plan on making lots of fresh squeezed orange juice!
Goodness gracious, you guys. I was not prepared for the amount of oranges on our tree. I managed to pick about three quarters around the bottom of the canopy that I could reach with our step ladder and handy dandy fruit picker from Home Depot. There were still lots of oranges left on our tree but my laundry basket was completely full!
All of the picked oranges are in a repurposed laundry basket (who am I kidding, it’s totally one of our regular laundry baskets that I wiped out later) which I used as a giant colander to wash the oranges in over a bucket so I could use the ‘gray’ water again in another part of our garden. Conscious water use in Arizona is very important!
After the oranges had dried, I cut them in half and used our electric citrus juicer to juice the oranges. The electric juicer made this step really easy! It turned into that kind of mindless work where you can really just veg out while juicing oranges. It’s great to do during nap time or after the kids are in bed and you feel like a moment to yourself. Well, now that veg time can be productive, too!
Our juicer isn’t the best at straining out all of the seeds, so first I tried straining the juice through a cheese cloth. It kind of worked, but when it came time to squeeze some of the pulp so I could get the remaining juice the cloth would sometimes give way and I would still get seeds in the juice. With a toddler, this is something I wanted to avoid! I ended up pouring the freshly squeezed orange juice into a fine metal mesh strainer over a large bowl, then using my spatula to stir the orange juice/pulp mixture around until just the pulp and seeds were left. You can keep straining the pulp through if you like your orange juice more pulpy, but at this point I thought eh, good enough!
I then poured the orange juice out of the bowl back into my measuring cup. Just as an FYI, it took about 8-10 oranges to get around 2 cups of freshly squeezed orange juice. This will vary on the size and the amount of juice your oranges will produce. (ha, produce. I love puns).
I found that a few places recommended freezing the juice in ice cube trays (you can use just about any freezer-safe dish, really) but, since I lack ice cube trays I went with the next-best thing….baby food trays! This option worked great since not only is it food-grade silicone, it’s more easy to get the ‘cubes’ out once frozen since the silicone portion of the tray is pretty pliable.
Freezing orange juice is great since not only can you defrost for on-demand orange juice, I like to use the frozen cubes in smoothies, dropped in sparkling water for an easy spritzer or use to keep your mimosas ice cold!
What other ways can you think of to use frozen orange juice? Be sure to let me know in the comments!
