Long story short, I ended up with a bunch of oranges. They were free, and I usually have an orange or apple with my lunch, so I took them.
Well, most of the oranges have tinges of green on them. And they’re no very juicy, nor sweet, and they’re very tough and fibrous. Conclusion: They’re underripe.
I know that some fruits will ripen a bit more when left out on the counter. Does that work with oranges? Alternately, is there anything tasty I could make from them that wouldn’t suffer from the underripeness?
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Every link in the Google search says “Oranges don’t ripen any further once they’ve been picked.”, you’re out of luck.
Also, Screwdrivers, they might suffer from the underripeness but after a couple you won’t notice!
Oranges don’t continue to ripen after they are picked. I guess the best use would be for marmalade, but for all that effort, you probably want to pony up for some ripe fruit.
I’m not doubting that your oranges are underripe, but this isn’t a reliable indicator. Many quite ripe oranges aren’t orange at all until they are dyed or treated with ethylene gas. As with tree leaves and their fall coloration, the orange color of the fruit isn’t apparent until the chlorophyll is gone. Sometimes this happens due to dropping temperatures at harvest time, but in warmer parts of the world, it doesn’t happen at all, and the fruit will remain green unless treated.
Lately all of the oranges I get from Costco have been on the underripe side. The supermarket ones have been riper, although sometimes they’re on the verge of going bad.
I had a thought: What if I dried them? Peel them, section them, lay them out on a cookie sheet, and put them in the oven all day at the lowest setting. Would that do anything interesting?
Just a guess here, but intuitively I would think that fully ripe oranges are more radioactive than under-ripe ones, and thus probably have a shorter half life.
For what it’s worth, I asked my mom, the preserves-maker in the family, and she didn’t reckon it’d be worth the effort to make marmalade with all the more oranges I have, but she suggested potpourri.