What a nice coincidence! Trader Tiki's blog had a post about orange juice - and some of the weird and unpleasant options for packaged juice. The question arose about which oranges made the best juice. Most of the time, "oranges" in Portland means navel oranges, navel oranges, and sometimes large navel oranges. I intend no criticism of the navel orange and certainly freshly -squeezed navel orange juice is worlds away from frozen, or pre-packaged juice of any kind. But there are better options.
I have always been partial to Valencia oranges for juice and eagerly await the arrival of Valencias in the local market. So I was very excited to find some today on a routine trip to New Seasons market and then was even more pleased to find another orange, called a Cara Cara - which ironically turned out to be a variant of the navel orange.
The Cara Cara is the orange on the left, the Valencia on the right. The Cara Cara is seedless, but a little more pulpy than the Valencia, yielding a less juice. On the other hand, the flavor of the Cara Cara was very sweet and rich; as much as I like Valencia, the Cara Cara knocked it out of the park--and it has that lovely deep color as well.
Under the circumstances, it seemed important to make a cocktail, if only to use up some of the juice. Or, really, to make a cocktail. I ended up with a Monkey Gland, from the 1920s.
The Monkey Gland
1.5 oz. Tanqueray
1.5 oz. freshly-squeed Cara Cara juice
1 tsp. Herbsaint
1 tsp. real grenadine
Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
3 comments:
Jeff,
the Cara Cara sounds nifty. I'll have to checkout the Arbor Lodge store to see if they have some.
What grenadine do you keep around?
All I've found is Stirrings -- haven't had the initiative to make my own. Yet.
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