In any event, one thing is for sure: Day-old lime juice tastes nasty to everyone. The bottled stuff you find in stores is usually treated with heat or preservatives to stabilize its flavor, as is orange and lime juice, which also suffer in flavor and color over time. Arnold tells me that he knows some bartenders who flash-pasteurize or bubble nitrogen through their lime juice in order to keep its flavor consistent in cocktails from day to day, but that’s not exactly feasible for those of us at home. Instead of trying to arrest the flavor of fresh lime or standing by with a stopwatch to capture its peak lime-ness, it’s better to think of “freshness” as a window of opportunity before your lime juice crosses the River Styx of oxidation.
“From the minute the juice hits the air, it starts to oxidize,” writes Toby Maloney, founding partner at Chicago’s lauded Violet Hour, in The Bartender’s Manifesto. “At The Violet Hour we say citrus juice is at its best between the stages of ‘squeezed à la minute’ up to 12 hours.”
With respect to Arnold’s experiments, however, Maloney writes that the difference between fresh-squeezed and four-hour juice is “mostly splitting hairs” to him.
“I've had many cocktails made with juice squeezed à la minute that were amazing, and I'm not sure if I could have possibly enjoyed them more if the juice had ‘breathed’ for a couple of hours,” he notes. “So, this is one of those nerd-out-if-you-please or don’t-worry-and-don’t-bother kind of situations that’s best left up to your discretion. Do tests yourself to find what works for your palate.”
Arnold agrees that the distinction is subtle, and one that has more relevance for a bar program than for home cocktail enthusiasts. “The difference between four- and five-hour-old lime juice and à la minute lime juice is real, but it’s not as big of a difference as that between either of those two juices and a day-old juice,” he says. “I would doubt that anyone could go to a bar, be handed a drink and say with certainty ‘this was four hours old’ or ‘this was squeezed just now.’”
If you want to be fastidious about cocktail consistency at home, you can set up a blind taste test with lime juice that’s been slightly diluted with water to bring the acidity down to a level where it won’t fry your taste receptors and allow you to detect slight flavor differences. My own test was not entirely scientific—it consisted of only two taste testers and limes of middling quality. But after blindly sampling juice that was fresh, four(ish) hours old, and six hours old, my fellow tester and I found that the four-hour juice did taste ever so slightly more lime-y than the fresh juice—a quality that was hard to pin down but certainly didn’t feel like it was balanced by bitterness. In a Lemon, Lime and Bitters cocktail, however, all three samples tasted nearly identical, as the other ingredients drowned out the subtle differences between them.
Wherever you end up landing on the timeline, it certainly won’t be with day-old. But if you want to squeeze some citrus a few hours ahead of your cocktail party, rest assured that your juice will still taste like it’s been freshly squeezed—or perhaps even better.
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December 08, 2023 at 01:32AM
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How Long Is Fresh-Squeezed Citrus Juice Still Considered Fresh? - Epicurious
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