"Super Juice" Calculator To make a high yield, stonger tasting, citrus juice
Extract
TLDR
7 times the juice out of a single citrus! First of all, wash your fruit! You don't want to eat the wax, coloring, or whatever else has been added. Then, just peel skin from the fruit, capturing as little pith as possible. Weigh the skins and add the acids per the calculator. Let sit for up to 2 hours until the acid does its work. Add skins, acid, and water to blender and blend thorouhgly. Strain and mix in the juice of the fruit.
Resulting juice will be cloudier than fresh sqeezed. It will last quite a bit longer due to lower proportions of succinic acid. It will also have a more intense fruit flavor.
Enjoy in your favorite cocktail!
What is Super Juice, anyway?
"Super Juice" is the creation of Nickle Morris, owner of the Expo Bar in Louisville, Kentucky. His invention was inspired by the need to serve a lime juice cocktail on tap (how many limes do you need to make a keg of margaritas?). He faced two big problems: First, he didn't have a good way to preserve a large amount of juice if he was serving outside without refrigeration. Second, the wasted lime shells frustrated him. He set off to find a technique to solve these problems. After a great deal of effort, he stumbled upon what he would call "oleo citrate".
Having experimented by coating lime skins in citric and malic acid (and humorously forgetting about them for a few days), he found the oils were being pulled out from the skin. This is similar to macerating fruits with sugar. He blended the peels with water, but this was only the first step. This mixture lacked the mouth feel of a squeezed juice. When he added actual juice, he found the sweet spot!
The Scientist
Since Nickle's innovation, many others have posted articles and videos. I first learned about Super Juice from "Cocktail Time With Kevin Kos". Kevin's approach is a bit more analytical. He bases his measurements on the weight of the skins, allowing for better control of the total yield. I modeled my first set of calculators after Kevin’s. He borrowed ratios from Dave Arnold's "Liquid Intelligence" and are different from Morris's.
The Next Generation
Another highly noticed addition to the party is Brian Tasch's Psuedo Citrus. Tasch's recipe introduces two fundamental changes to the Super Juice reicpe: Adding sugar and removing the fresh juice. By my reckoning, sugar helps improve the mouth feel of the product and restores a conspicuously missing component. The exclusion of lime juice improves consistency and extends shelf life as significantly fewer of the degrading acids are in the final product.
I’ve also added a custom calculator which calculator allows you to adjust the acidity from lime’s 6% to whatever you’d like. It also has slots for up to two other optional ingredients.
Super Juiceand Psuedo Juice are less expensive alternatives to fresh-squeezed juice. It's also has a lower footprint, is more flavorful, and less laborious at scale. I've tried Super Juice with lime, lemon, and orange juice. The lime juice pops, and makes extremely fruity margaritas and daiquiris. I find orange the most interesting because it has intense orange flavor (sans sweetness) but the acidity of a lime. As a result, you can use it as a replacement and make an orange margarita, for example.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this. Go ahead amd make your own Super Juice for your next cocktail party!
References
- Portland Cocktail Week - Better Lemonade: Oleo Citrate & Super Juice
- Punch - "Super Juice" Is Coming for Your Daiquiri
- Portland Cocktail Week - Super Juice with Nickle Morris and Ryan LeClaire
- Cocktail Time with Kevin Kos - How to Get 8x as Much Juice From One Citrus?
- The Educated Barfly - Super Juice, is it really? Does it last?
- Maximizing Citrus Part 3: Mastering Pseudo Citrus