The Juice is Loose

The Produce Department recently invested in a pretty cool citrus juicer, and astute shoppers may have noticed a few new housemade products: fresh-squeezed Valencia orange juice, lemon and lime juice, and lemonade and limeade sweetened with organic sugar. Today, I sadly juiced the last blood oranges of the season for our blood orange-Valencia blend.

The juicer is quite an impressive piece of equipment. It’s a little taller than I am , and has a hopper at the top that holds about forty pounds of oranges. Fruit feeds down over a blade that splits the fruit in half, and then into a set of wheels with cups and balls. The halves are crushed, but the skin is left largely intact, making for a less bitter juice. And the thing can juice forty fruits per minute!

Fresh-squeezed juice is just one of the exciting new developments produce has in store for you this year! When food production moved to the Makery, produce was able to take over some second-floor prep kitchen space for ourselves, including real estate for our giant juice machine. Twice a week, we are juicing organic Valencia oranges sourced through our friends at the Organically Grown Company (OGC) in Portland, with whom we’ve partnered for many years to source other produce, too. For many years, OGC was a farmer- and worker-owned co-op, and in recent years, has been placed into a perpetual trust.

Organically Grown Company is an outstanding business, and they do great work to support and advance sustainable, organic agriculture in the Pacific Northwest. They are currently providing us with Valencias from Buck Brand, one of our favorite California citrus growers, and they will continue to keep us supplied with juicing oranges throughout the year.

More excitement is on the way! By the time you read this, we will have at least one shelf of watermelon halves and quarters, and there are bigger, juicier things on the horizon. The Co-op will be installing new coolers and moving a few things around to make space for them. The produce team will start to cut more than just watermelon – fruit, veggies, and more. Jackfruit is high on the list! Weighing in around 15 to 25 pounds, these delicious, but gigantic, fig relatives are too much to handle for most people. We’ll start cutting them into quarters and eighths, so more people can enjoy these tropical wonders.

This is the aspect that excites me most about cut fruit: allowing people to try more things, things they’ve never tried before, and making it easier to add new healthy foods to their life. Not everyone has the capacity to do the prep work some produce requires, even if they know how. Peeled and cored pineapple, zoodles, mirepoix, mixed berries, and more will all find their way to the shelf soon as well. We hope to set up the coolers in early August, and then we will start rolling out the goodies.

Finally, we are excited about next citrus season. We started juicing at the tail-end of citrus season, partly by design. With limited availability of certain citrus fruits, we felt good starting out with a focus on just a few new juices. That said, the juicer has three sets of wheels and mechanisms that can process a pretty wide range of fruit sizes. This upcoming season, keep your eyes peeled for Cara Cara navel orange juice, Rio Star grapefruit juice, tangerine juice, and more. We will share plenty of free samples and plan to show you some behind-the-scenes action of the machine behind the magic. It’s exciting to see it in person! Did I mention that it juices 40 fruits a minute?

If you haven’t tried our fresh juice yet, summer is the perfect time to fill up on liquid sunshine.

Written by Ben Goe for the July 2024 Natural Enquirer