Oranges Citrus × sinensis
Zest before you juice. The oil in the peel carries more flavor than the juice does.
1 recipe on this site
In the kitchen
Under heat
Heat drives off the volatile oils in the zest almost instantly, which is why zest goes in at the end of cooking, not the start.
Against air
Cut oranges dry out at the flesh within an hour; the membrane holds juice in far longer than an exposed cut face does.
In storage
They keep for weeks in the fridge, unlike most fruit — the thick peel is doing the work.
At the shop
Weight matters more than color. A heavy orange for its size has more juice, regardless of how bright the skin is.
Which variety, for what
- Navel
- Seedless and easy to segment — the default eating orange.
- Blood orange
- More acidic with a berry note plain juice doesn't have — good where you want color and edge together.
- Valencia
- Thin-skinned and juicy, the standard for fresh-squeezed juice.
Beyond the kitchen
ALL CITRUS IS THREE FRUITS
Nearly every citrus fruit is a hybrid of just three ancestral species: citron, pomelo and mandarin. The sweet orange is a pomelo-mandarin cross. Lemons, limes, grapefruit and the rest are further combinations of the same small set.
EVERY NAVEL IS ONE TREE
The navel orange arose as a single mutation on a tree in Bahia, Brazil, around 1820. It is seedless, so it cannot reproduce — every navel orange in the world is grafted from that original, and two of the first trees sent to Riverside, California in 1873 founded the entire industry.
THE COLOUR IS NAMED AFTER IT
In English the fruit gave its name to the colour, not the other way round. Before the fruit reached England the colour was described as yellow-red or by comparison to saffron; the word orange for a colour is attested only from the sixteenth century.
ORANGE BLOSSOM
The flowers yield neroli oil and orange flower water, both long-standing in perfumery and in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean baking. Bitter orange trees are grown commercially for the blossom and the peel as much as for the fruit.
A longer history
Sweet oranges are a hybrid that arose in southern China or Southeast Asia and were cultivated there for millennia. Bitter oranges reached the Mediterranean first, carried by Arab traders and planted across Spain, Sicily and North Africa from around the tenth century; Seville's bitter orange trees are a direct legacy.
Sweet oranges arrived in Europe much later, brought by Portuguese traders in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — which is why several languages, including Greek, Albanian and Romanian, still call them by a word derived from Portugal. They became a luxury of the wealthy, and the orangery, a heated glasshouse for overwintering citrus, became a fixture of grand European houses.
Florida and California built enormous industries on the fruit from the nineteenth century, and frozen concentrated orange juice, developed in the 1940s, turned it into a breakfast commodity worldwide. Brazil is now the largest producer by a wide margin, and most of the global crop is juiced rather than eaten whole.
