Quoi de mieux pour démarrer la journée…
Je me suis toujours interrogé sur le jus d’orange au rayon frais, style Tropicana… surtout quand ce n’est plus la saison des oranges dans l’hémisphère nord.
En fait, votre « jus d’orange frais “pure premium” qui n’est pas fait de concentré » en Tetra Pak peut avoir plus d’un an d’âge, et être rajeuni avec des ingrédients confidentiels pour lui donner le même bon goût toute l’année. C’est beau la technologie. « 100 % pur jus », revenez-en.
Vous avez maintenant le sentiment qu’on vous prend pour un con ? C’est que vous devez l’être un peu. C’est le commerce.
[…] Let’s start with the obvious: oranges only grow in certain seasons, and because orange juice goes bad after a short period of time, orange juice providers had to come up with a way of storing the juice if they weren’t going to go with the old school method of freezing juice in concentrate. What they came up with is a process called “deaeration,” in which the oranges are picked, the oranges are squeezed, the juice is heated to eliminate bacteria, and then the juice is kept in vast, zillion-gallon tanks from which oxygen is eliminated. This allows the juice to not spoil for up to a year. The downside to this process is that the juice loses its taste, so when the juice is ready to be packaged for consumption, flavor packets are added to give it its consistent, “pure,” orangey taste. Fragrance companies responsible for the same formulas used for perfumes come up with the right taste concoctions that you and I know as orange juice.
[…] This process certainly explains why every carton of Tropicana OJ tastes exactly the same. It also explains why Tropicana juice tastes different in different countries—because Tropicana modifies the flavor packets to the popular taste preferences of different regions. It’s also why Minute Maid’s Pure Squeezed orange juice tastes different—they use different flavor packets. Did you catch that? It’s called “pure squeezed,” which sounds a whole lot like fresh squeezed, but it’s not. Which brings us to the most important point of all: haven’t you ever wondered why a fresh squeezed glass of OJ tastes so different from these “pure” orange juices? It’s the process, stupid.
I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at myself. I never wondered why.
Food Republic, Tom Roston: “What’s Really In Your Orange Juice?”
When the juice is stripped of oxygen it is also stripped of flavor providing chemicals. Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren’t listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature. The packs added to juice earmarked for the North American market tend to contain high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice that, juice companies have discovered, Americans favor. Mexicans and Brazilians have a different palate. Flavor packs fabricated for juice geared to these markets therefore highlight different chemicals, the decanals say, or terpene compounds such as valencine.
NutritionDigest, Alissa Hamilton: “‘Fresh’ Squeezed?”