There are different varieties of navel oranges. Some of them peel more easily than others. This has been true for many years. I don’t know why you used to get only hard to peel varieties.
The peel will protect the interior from any pesticides that only land on the peel and stay there. However, some pesticides are systemic, which means that they’re taken up by the plant and distributed throughout it along with water and nutrients. I don’t know which pesticides are used on oranges, or how many of them are systemic.
I buy oranges regularly in the winter. I don’t buy them often in the summer, when there’s local fresh fruit available.
I always have either an apple or an orange with my lunch (I try to change it up because I like variety), so I buy a lot of them year-round. I find that they’re hugely inconsistent. They can be juicy and sweet, or bland. They can be big or small. They can be easy or hard to peel. But they’re all labeled the same.
There’s a similar amount of variability among apples, but apples have a bunch of varieties. Once you know what variety of apple you like, you can be pretty sure of what you’re going to get. With oranges, though, it’s just “navel oranges”, and you roll the dice.
I don’t buy oranges often, but I always stop and get some when my route takes my past California Fruit Depot east of Bakersfield. In season, right from the orchard, they’re the best. I’ve had some very good ones at roadside stands in Florida but they are hit and miss.
I buy oranges, but never in the summer when there are so many other choices for fruit: peaches, cherries, strawberries, etc. Autumn is apple season, and spring is for lemons or pineapples. But a good orange in the winter is always welcome. We usually buy bags of clementines, but they’re not really in season now (which is November to April, I was told).
Walmsrt doesn’t identify the type of navel orange. They may have a different variety later this year.
The worst I got a few years ago were so difficult that the peel came off in thumbnail size pieces. That was after using a paring knife to precut the peel into segments.
All the white rind stayed on the flesh. I used a vegetable peeler to remove that bitter tasting white.
I waited several summers before buying oranges again. I bought Del Monte canned mandarin orange slices instead. The no sugar added cans are pretty good.
Some people refrigerate fresh oranges. I think all the juices dry up and the orange is not worth eating.
It’s probably safe to say that ALL polls need an “other” answer.
This one sure does. My “other” answer is that I remember loving naval oranges going back decades - sweet, gentle, seedless, easy-to-eat. Never too sour, never challenging. Not worthwhile for juicing (too bland), but excellent for eating straight.
I’m a bit surprised at the “so much better today” characterization as I remember them being delicious way back 40 or 50 years ago.
Now that we grow citrus ourselves at our home in Hawai’i, we have naval oranges (from one tree), but they are not the same as the ones I used to eat out of hand, and they are not good for that. Their key characteristic is that they are seedless. They are great for juicing - we’ve had some wonderful OJ from that tree. But ugh, no - nothing like the commercial naval oranges you can get for straight-up consumption.
I’ve had a bag of mandarin oranges in the fridge for nearly a month and they’re still fine and juicy, though not as firm as when they were fresh. I think keeping most types of oranges in the fridge is fine, but I wouldn’t push it past about a month.
As a very broad generality, California grows eating oranges and Florida grows juicing oranges.
The juicing breeds look, well, scruffy, and have a sort of unpleasnant consistency if eaten. But boy are they juicy and flavorful sweet.
You could do like an old friend of mine did and simply eat the whole thing peel and all. Just like way most folks eat an apple: open wide and take a big chomp. Repeat until gone. And no pesky core to mess with. So easy.
If you didn’t buy it directly from an orange farm, it’s been in a refrigerator since it left the tree a week or a month ago. I agree that a refrigerated orange will eventually become unpalatable because it’s slowly dessicating in there. But that’ll happen 2 or 3 weeks after it would have rotted sitting in your fruit bowl on a table. I’d much rather have an orange bought a week ago that’s been in your fridge the whole time than one that’s been sitting out in your house the same whole time.
I worked in retail for 50 years and when I packed my lunch the orange never got chosen because by the time you disassemble the thing your hands and clothes are covered in juice, and after you eat it you must floss your teeth to get the pulp out. Now that i am retired I can be picky.
If I cut open and orange and it is perfect I slice it into like 6 wedges and open up each one and bite the flesh off the rind, and really enjoy it. When it is perfect no fruit is better. Typically though they are yellow and sour. I may eat 1/4th of it and dip it in sugar to get it down the rest gets thrown and I HATE wasting food, but sorry sour orange.
My favourite oranges for eating (as opposed to juicing) are clementines, which are actually a subset of mandarins. When available (they’re usually seasonal) clementine oranges are easy to peel, usually seedless, and sweet and delicious. Both clementines and the larger class of mandarins produce great orange juice but it’s an expensive way to get it as opposed to larger and more common oranges.
After hearing all of the hype about Cara Caras, I tried a package of them, and found that they were sweet, but didn’t have any flavor beyond sweet. It’s not an orange if it doesn’t have any tartness.
Anyway, I think that the variability neatly accounts for both “They’re so much better than they used to be!” and “they’re so much worse than they used to be!”. If you happened to have gotten a bad batch back in the day, and swore them off, and then got a good batch recently, you’d say they were much better. And likewise for the other direction.
Total agreement. Clementines are the ideal orange. Easy to peel, and you can eat 1, 2, or 3 as the mood strikes. Storing half a full-sized orange for later is … problematic as the (middle-aged) kids say.
And to @sb1953’s good point about mess … The peels are rather dry and come off easily, so you don’t end up getting messy juicy just getting the fruit open. And since each segment is bite sized, there’s no splurt of juice as there would be biting into an orange segment that’s too large to eat in one bite.
Yes, handwashing after is still nice to have, but isn’t totally need to have. And your clothes are about as safe as they can be while eating or drinking anything.