Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published September 22, 2006 Click here for the current edition In An Orange Mood These are hard times for lovers of freshly-squeezed orange juice. I am one of those, and I am suffering in more ways than one. Drinking a big glass of orange juice that I just extracted from fresh oranges is one of my favorite food addictions. I do it every morning, to the accompaniment of my wife's head-shaking. She can't figure out either why this is so important to me, or how any glass of juice could be worth the trouble. Even though she's watched me do it for nineteen years. But it is worth it. There are few flavors I enjoy more. I'd say I like it better than I like even a great wine. But not now. The new crop of oranges has not appeared anywhere yet, and we're getting the last of the crop still hanging on the trees in California from next year. (California uses its citrus trees as storage bins, more or less.) We're also getting oranges from places like South Africa. Either way, they're very expensive. The cost of my juice this morning was over three dollars. Three oranges at a buck apiece. It was the best price I could find. And, as is always the case with nature's products, when an item is most expensive and rarest, it's also at its worst. This is not very good orange juice in the glass in front of me now. The pulp component is truly ridiculous, and the sweetness is low. Florida--the second-best source of juice oranges--has had so many bad hurricanes in the past few years that a great deal of their orange trees are out of production. Most of what they grow goes into frozen and bottled juice; the fresh-orange business is almost a sideline, and certainly a second priority. Last year's crop was sparse and expensive (although the quality was as fine as ever). The very best juice oranges have suffered an even worse fate. Those come from Plaquemines Parish. And I don't have to tell you what happened there. In the southern part of the parish and all of its East Bank, the saltwater flood killed all the trees outright. North of Port Sulphur on the West Bank, the trees survived, but last year most of the fruit just fell to the ground, because there was nobody to pick it. I'm hoping we get some Plaquemines oranges this year, but I'm not betting on it. We did, however, get Louisiana oranges last year from groves around Chauvin, which were affected by neither hurricane. Those were very good, but not numerous in the markets. As if all that weren't enough to bring me down, my juicer broke down permanently yesterday morning. This one was holding on longer than its three predecessors, none of which lasted a full year. (One, the most expensive with a fine Italian design, lasted less than a month.) But it was not the equal of my previous machine, which served me well for over twenty years before giving up the fight. I cannot find another one of those (the Braun Citromatic II, for what it's worth.) Last night I bought the only variety of juicer at Bed, Bath and Beyond. It was a Cuisinart--good brand, I guess. It was shaped like a big coffee cup, with stainless-steel sides that would match our stainless-steel counter perfectly. (Which is the only aspect of a juicer my wife gives a damn about.) It had an intriguing feature I never heard of before, but it sounded good: a high-speed centrifugal action to spin the residual juice from the pulp. That would save me a step (I've become quite adept at doing this with a spoon.) This morning, I used it for the first time. One inconvenient feature appeared immediately: not much juice can collect in the receptacle under the strainer, and so you have to position a glass under the spout to catch it all. Unfortunately, the juicer would not stay still on the counter, revolving just enough in the direction of the reamer to push the spout out of alignment with the glass. But that problem was solved by another problem. After one and a half oranges, the tremendous amount of pulp coming from these California jobs had stopped up the spout entirely. The strainer basket under the reamer had also become full of pulp, and the juice was overflowing, first into the receptacle, then over the stainless-steel sides of the gizmo onto the counter. I figured this would be a good time to use that centrifugal spinner. I unplugged the spout, moved the glass into position, and started the hi-speed. Immediately, orange pulp began to fly in all directions, over the walls, the floor, and my shirt. Not what I had in mind. Clearly, you needed to operate this feature with the cover of the unit, which in past juicers has only been there to keep flies out of the thing between uses. That helped, but the spout stopped up again, and again. When I finally got the three oranges processed, I had a scant glass of juice with more pulp in it than I'd ever gotten from fresh oranges. This is a good thing, actually, but the amount of work involved in getting to this point was tripe what I was used to, including the extreme cleanup. Even if the juice had been good, I think this would have taken the pleasure-to-aggravation ratio below one. I don't know about this thing. But the only other juicers out there are those extractor deals, which get juice out of carrots and cactus fruits and watermelons very well, but do a very poor (and time-consuming) job with oranges. What I need is one of those big machines that make juice for restaurants. But those cost over a grand. And if I did that, I'd never hear the end of it. © 2006 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com