In Greece I had a bunch of orange juice and it was so good. Fresh squeezed and sweet & refreshing. American orange juice is always sour, even when fresh. What is the difference between the two? Do Greeks use a different orange than Americans? Is great orange juice a phenomenon in all of Europe or the Mediterranean region?
Despite the tag (not my) this is not soda like Fanta orange, but rather juice.
Chances are this has to do with the age of the orange, how long it has been in transport, storage conditions during transport, and how long it has been sitting around after arriving at its destination. Greece is a small country. Short travel distance from tree to glass.
If you live in an orange producing place in the USA, like South Texas, the oranges that come from there will produce the sweetest orange juice you have probably ever tasted. I’ll include California and Florida in that. Many homes on the southside of San Antonio and farther south have orange trees in their yards. I’m guessing that those oranges will produce some very sweet juice.
Also, some varieties of oranges give sweeter juice than others. Around here Valencia oranges are the best choice for juicing.
The real question is why do frappes taste so much better in Greece/the Balkans than they do here?
Answer: instant coffee is superior.
Commercial orange juice in America has all the oxygen removed which dramatically increases its shelf life but also eliminates most of the actual flavor. The flavor is then added back in using “flavor packs” of orange oil, orange essence, and other byproducts of processing that are specially formulated for each brand so the flavor remains consistent across batches and seasons.
But the OP mentions this observation with fresh American OJ too.
Which American orange juices are you comparing it to?
It’s been a long time since I had orange juice regularly enough to have an accurate feel for how the various kinds taste, but I remember from my youth that the orange juice we had most often at home was made from frozen concentrate, and it tasted fairly sweet and good. Canned orange juice tasted significantly different, and much sourer.
I think part of it is the actual ripeness of the oranges. Store oranges tend to be shipped underripe, because, well, they have a lot more time before they go bad and become waste for the seller.
When I’ve been in an area where I could get very fresh oranges, I could get ones that were fully ripe and amazingly sweet. But those same fruits wouldn’t have travelled well.
This is it. Oranges grow in Greece. To here some people talk, they’re like papaya trees in Hawai’i - every-fucking-where. They don’t grow in Indiana (or grow well, anyway). It is highly likely any given Greek hotel is getting their fresh oranges from either the grounds or nearby neighborhood markets. Meanwhile even in the orange-growing areas of the U.S. like CA and Florida, production tends to lean heavily towards the large-scale commercial market, rather than the local Farmer’s Market. You can get great oranges in the U.S., but 98% of American hotels are going to be buying highly-variable-quality fruit from a large supermarket or commercial supplier
When I was a kid we always got Florida juice oranges for juicing, which were much more flavorful and sweeter than navel oranges. They had lots of seeds. Orange juice from navel oranges just isn’t as good.
This is one reason I love Mexico. The juices are so fresh.
And, well, I think it’s deceptive advertising in many ways. Yeah, it’s from oranges, yeah, it was frozen, and may have thawed. Who knows. But it’s oranges.
I feel the same about noodles.
Me -“Are they home made”
Waiter- “Of course”
This means, to them, that they boiled dry spaghetti and some time during the day.
I see a huge difference in “not from concentrate” bottles of juice but yes, even squeezed-in-front-of-me OJ in America is lower quality than Greek OJ.
You want to ask for freshly made pasta, not homemade. Which by the way I personally feel is vastly overrated 
. I prefer the slightly denser texture of (fancier, bronze cut) dried 90% of the time.
I like fresh squeezed American fine, but I don’t have anything to compare it to for fresh. I tend to prefer tarter tastes, and I find the American stuff I’ve had to be a nice balance between lively acidity and just enough sweetness.
Meanwhile I’ve never had a bottled juice or frozen concentrate that tastes like actual orange juice to me. I thought I simply didn’t like OJ until I had fresh squeezed.
I live in Florida, and squeezed-in-front-of-you orange juice doesn’t hold a candle to juice from a ripe orange just picked off that there tree. The reason is that oranges don’t continue to ripen after they’re picked, they just lose flavor over time.
I haven’t had fresh orange juice in Greece so I can’t speak as to which is better, though.
~Max
A point worth noting. It’s been a long time since I had reconstituted frozen orange juice, and I can’t say whether it’s inferior to the much newer “not from concentrate” bottled juices, but both are highly processed. Both (as someone pointed out earlier) are degassed to remove oxygen, treated with additives, and are heat-pasteurized.
There’s a supermarket near me that fresh-squeezes oranges in the store daily. They put the juice in bottles, but this is not “bottled orange juice”, it’s real, unadulterated, unpasteurized orange juice that happens to be in a bottle, and it tastes fantastically better than mass-produced bottled OJ. It also has a very short shelf life, hence the reason for all the processing of the mass-produced stuff.
There’s a scene in an episode of Fawlty Towers where a demanding American guest asks for vodka and orange juice. Basil brings him the usual drink of vodka and bottled OJ, and the American’s reaction is, “what the hell is this?” Exactly expresses my impression of bottled OJ after having the real thing.
Yeah, a number of groceries around here do that. My kids—and I swear I did not condition them for this, as I almost never buy OJ for myself — far far prefer the fresh squeezed bottled stuff, a bit to my chagrin as it is a bit spendy. So OJ is basically a treat around our household.