Tart and Tangy Tangerine Juice

While I really like orange juice, tangerine juice is so much better.  It is tart and tangy.  We have five tangerine trees and they are all loaded up with fruit.  Unlike satsumas and oranges, tangerine peels stick to the fruit and is very hard to peel off. Generally, I'll just quarter them and eat them right out of the peels versus peeling them.

But my favorite thing to do is to just make juice with them.  On this dreary, rainy weekend I had Benjamin go snag a bunch of tangerines off the smallest tree.  He brought them in and filled up the vegetable sink with them.  Even though it had been raining and the fruit was wet, I scrubbed some of the fruit that was dirty.

Tangerines

I like using an old fashioned glass citrus juicer to squeeze out the juice.  Tangerines are so juicy.  For being a small fruit, they are loaded with juice.  They have their share of seeds, but we strain those out.

The juice from an average-sized tangerine will almost fill the hand juicer.

I pour the fresh-squeezed tangerine juice through a strainer or sieve to strain out the seeds and some of the pulp.  I'll use a spoon to stir around the seeds and pulp in the strainer so that every last bit of the juice all goes in the quart-sized, wide mouth mason jar.

In addition to tasting SO good, especially when it is chilled, tangerine juice has the most beautiful neon orange color.

While we drink a lot of it fresh, we'll pour it into quart sized Ziploc bags, seal them up tight and lay them flat in the freezer.

That way we'll have plenty to thaw out and drink in the summertime.  Delicious, nutritious - Tangerine juice is my favorite citrus juice.