What to do with sour oranges?
 

There is an abandoned citrus grove behind my house. I picked some fruit and brought it home. I think the trees have reverted to their rootstock and are producing sour, very seedy fruit. I juiced four and froze it while exploring recipes. So far I have marinade for chicken or pork and salad dressing (substitute for vinegar). Any other thoughts? There are navel type oranges and a small orange with loose skin like a clementine.

Marinade for Cuban roast pork or a whole hos of Cuban dishes?

Sounds like a potential daiquiri ingredient - potentially covering the lemon and triplesec.

You could try making a shrub. Then add gin. Or vodka. Or rum.

Yes, adding enough gin, will make you forget how sour the oranges are :p

This stuff is seriously sour. If I make a drink out of it, it will be called The Atomic Warhead.

Make marmalade?

Make a kind of "Orange-cello"
Substituting oranges for lemons:
Wash the oranges well.
Zest the peel off around 10 oranges with a zester. Don't grate. Try to avoid the white pith.
Put the zest in a large jar, cover with a liter of good vodka. Put the lid on loosely and let it sit in a cool dark place for a week.
After a week, combine 3 cups of white sugar with 4 cups of water and bring to a boil. Do not stir. Boil for 15 minutes, then cool mixture to room temp.
Stir the vodka mixture into the syrup. Strain into glass bottles and seal the bottles with a cork.
Let the mixture age 2 weeks at room temp.
Then put the bottles in the freezer until icy cold before serving.
Store in the freezer.

Orange ponzu with that orange juice instead of lemon juice. Perfect for the summer (we just bought a litre bottle of Kikkoman ponzu for lock down cooking as we use so much of the stuff in the summer months)

This is a recipe by Harumi Kurihara that can be easily adapted
100ml mirin (or mirim if you get a Korean version - totally interchangeable)
100ml soy sauce
60ml lemon juice (your orange juice should be perfect)
5cm piece konbu seaweed (or reduce the amount of soy sauce by 20% or so and substitute that amount with concentrated dashi stock - if you don’t have that, just leave it out, or add thinly sliced dried shiitake or a drop of anchovy sauce to get a little more umami in there)
To make the ponzu soy sauce: In a small saucepan, bring the mirin to the boil, then reduce the heat and cook for a further 2-3 minutes over a low heat to burn off the alcohol. Remove from the heat and add the soy sauce, lemon juice and konbu and leave to cool.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...0cool.&f=false

Finely sliced fresh cabbage drizzled with ponzu is one of my favourite side dishes, but it’s extremely versatile.

Is it more sour than a lemon/lime?

How many different trees did you try to get oranges from? If it is an abandoned grove, you may want to try a few trees more to the center. When I had Valencia Oranges prior to the Citrus Canker destruction by the State, there were sweet and sour oranges coming off my tree. I believed it was because of cross pollination as I had a Key Lime as well as a Ruby Red Grapefruit tree within 100 feet of the Valencia Orange.

I would say yes, although part of the sourness is the surprise factor.

The grove was abandoned in the 70’s. I suspect that wind damage removed the sweet Orange grafts and the sour orange rootstock thrived thereafter. As I understand it, sour orange rootstock is used because it produces a hardier, more cold resistant tree. If the hurricanes of the past destroyed the tree above the graft line, then the rootstock will regrow and produce sour oranges.

I can get a little deeper and remove fruit from more trees to see what I come up with. Four oranges yielded enough juice for me to make a mojo marinade and I have some pork shoulder in the fridge to try it on. I’ll marinate it overnight and toss it in the crockpot tomorrow. No big loss if it doesn’t work out.

Yikes, that's a tough one. As others have suggested and you noted, a mojo benefits greatly from a real sour orange note. A lot of Americanized Mexican/Cuban/Caribbean recipes use lemons and oranges because the original ingredient was sour orange. Could be a lot of uses there. You can always add a bit of sugar to offset it as well. Jerk chicken or really anything that uses a lemon or lime could easily be subbed.

I would sub it in for lemon with roasted/baked/grilled fish recipes as well.

I will reserve a little to brush on Friday night’s mahi-mahi before I put it on the grill.

How about the real Orange Chicken (not the one offered by Panda Express)?

I made a mojo marinade using the juice, some olive oil, oregano, cumin and some 8 cloves of garlic. I sliced the pork shoulder and left it in the marinade overnight in the fridge. I threw it in the crock pot this morning with half the marinade and a cup of chicken broth. The whole house smells like garlic, which I find encouraging.

I’m done walking for today but tomorrow I will hike deeper into the grove and pick a half dozen more.

I haven’t gotten back but the mojo pork was a success. I’m looking forward to further experimentation.

Bring me a shrubbery.

When life hands me sour oranges, I make sour orangeade.

I have deliberately planted a Seville orange tree to get sour oranges for marmalade. We get through about 40 fruits a year on this endeavour. Sevilles traditionally are used, but I think any sour orange with lots of pips (for the pectin) can be used.

In my view the best recipe is Nigella Lawson's - she adds just a few lemons (again sour ones).

Marmalade was the first thing that popped into my head when I read sour oranges.

I’ll see your Nigella and raise you a Delia, taken from a 1970s copy of her Complete Cookery Course.

Oh, my. These are good. Growing up, our Thanksgiving turkey always had a naranja agria (sour orange, Seville orange) marinade to it. The recipe was given to my grandmother by a Sephardic family friend, and my grandmother changed it up. Then my mother changed it up a bit. But the basics are all the same. Just sour orange, EVOO, garlic, rosemary, thyme, bay leaves, kosher salt, pepper, whatever other herbs you like, all mushed together then rubbed on your turkey (inside and out) then left overnight in the refrigerator to marinate.

I am wondering if BamaVol ever found sweet oranges in the grove?

So fantastic about the sour orange. Wow!!

What about making an orange liqueur like limoncello but with oranges? There is a lot of sugar in it so that would offset some of the sourness.