Orange Lemon Juice Recipe – A Welcome Drink Recipe Idea

I barely make juices at home since whatever fruits we buy, we prefer to eat as is without squeezing it out and adding more sugar or sweeteners. Plus, I’d rather make paneer than make juice – it’s all about priorities. However, I was raised on a healthy amount of hand-squeezed juices. Amma would juice pretty much anything that came her way and we always welcomed guests with a nice cold glass of juice, aptly called a welcome drink – here’s Amma’s favourite welcome drink recipe.

I love all things citrusy and making a juice of orange with some drops of lemon and sugar just seemed like a welcome change to the usual tea we have in the evenings. This orange lemon juice was born out of necessity though.

The other day, we saw this huge orange being sold in a supermarket nearby. When I say huge, I mean huge – almost three times the size of a regular orange. See below for comparison in sizes of the orange against a pretty large-sized lemon. See what I mean? I am sure there’s some other name to this fruit than “orange” so if you know, please share share your wisdom.

Update: thanks to the many who pointed out that this is actually a mandarin. I have seen the regular mandarins that come individually packed during Chinese New Year but this one was huge so I got confused. Thanks for clarifying, you all know who you are 🙂

Chinese New Year time is when all sorts of oranges in different shapes and form enter the market. Although this is our 4th Chinese New Year in Singapore, neither of us had seen an orange this big. So we did what any curious person would do and bought one.

It peeled like any other orange would do but with a bit more resistance. The skin was thick, the insides were more fibrous and the seeds were huge. We both bit into one piece with great anticipation but owwww, it was very very sour.

So I did the obvious thing and juiced it. That one orange + a few drops of lemon juice gave us three 200ml glasses of orange lemon juice.

I altered the proportion of orange : lemon in each glass which explains the difference in colours. We polished off all three glasses of juice in a matter of minutes! Make these for guests or your dehydrated kids/selves when the sun is hot and there’s that lull between breakfast and lunch. Your body will thank you for it.

I don’t like pulp in my orange juice so passed the juice through a relatively fine-meshed sieve. You can squeeze the juice directly using a hand-juicer and just remove the seeds if that’s what you prefer. I used my blender for the job.