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I’m very excited that I just tracked down some sour oranges and could play with them at home. I was hoping to figure out how tart they really are so I can do my best to fake it year round in drinks because oranges are a beautiful potential cocktail acid. All you need to do is add a calculated dose of citric acid.
The six large sour oranges I bought yielded 1.75 cups of juice and had a PH of 3.01 which is the same as orange juice listed in Harold McGee’s tables in On Food and Cooking, The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Lemon juice is listed as 2.1 and black coffee as 5.01. Well, I thought that entry in the table was for a conventional orange so I tested some regular stuff in the fridge which weighed in as a PH of 4.08 and had nearly the same brix as the sour orange of about 12. Now when I fake the juice it will be easy to get to the right acidity as citric but it will still take some concessions for the wildness of flavor. Oh well. I’m bored with lemon juice and this, besides being fun, has some over the top incredible economics. A gallon of fresh squeezed lemon juice costs a lot of money for the lemons and even more for the labor to squeeze them. A gallons of tart orange juice costs five dollars for something very fresh and pulpy, can be adulterated perfectly in mere minutes and is super fun to explore. And I know people hate powdered citric acid sour mix but because this is heavily subsidized by real fresh fruit it never becomes lame like that.
Now for a cocktail with the real stuff. I’ve called this by many names but now I’m leaning on Lioness
lioness
2 oz. amber rum (flor de cana)
1 oz. pimento dram (my own with recipe coming soon)
1 oz. sour orange juice
dash of peychaud’s bitters, shake with adequate ice… blah blah blah.
This is quite satisfying and for some reason brings out the vanilla bean that I put into my pimento dram. The cocktail has elegant dryness within the average of people’s tastes and lemon juice might be far less successful because the increased acidity might accentuate the heat of the dram too much. The piney and pepperiness of my particular allspice berry lingers on the palate like a fine Gewurztraminer. I added the bitters after I made the drink so I could see how they altered the cocktail. The choice of bitters subliminally does something to make the drink taste fuller and less skeletal.
Next time I need to fake it I will give a gram measurement of citric acid required to get standard orange juice to tart Seville territory.so stay tuned.
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