28 Days of Recipes: Orange Julius

You know what really warms my heart?  Mall food.  Its one of the few things that makes braving a trip through a crowded shopping mall at all worth it.  Soft pretzels, giant cookies, smoothies...and if you're a 90s kid, I bet you remember this one.

The Orange Julius 

Sadly, for some reason, Orange Julius has gone the way of black lipstick, flannel shirts, and Chumbawumba - some of those things not regrettably - but really, what happened to cause this much loved shopping mall oasis to just drop off the face of the earth?

My guess is raw eggs.  

See, the ingredient that gave the Orange Julius its robust "something extra" flavor and foamy head was two eggs.  And as we all know, sometimes raw eggs come with a little something extra that we didn't pay for, like a few weeks of vomiting and crapping our pants, missed work days, E. coli and salmonella...you get the idea.    Now, for the most part, its actually fairly safe to eat them, which is probably why the franchise lasted as long as it did.  Sadly, all it takes is one food poisoning lawsuit to become a thing of the past, a tasty nostalgia tucked away in your underwear drawer next to your Sony Walkman and tapes recorded off the radio.

So I'm here to offer some alternatives to the raw egg issue, as well as provide instructions for the brave folk who want to kick it old school.  Here is a basic recipe I found on the internet for the "original" Orange Julius:

1 cup orange juice

1 cup water

2 eggs

3/4 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 cup ice

...and blend.  

I got this recipe off www.food.com, if you are interested in reading somebody else's cooking blogs, but I'm going to assume loyalty here.

If you are not "Insane in the Membrane", like most people these days are when it comes to food, there are a few alternatives to the 2 raw eggs in your Orange Julius.  

1.  Egg beaters.  They're basically egg whites, but whatever it is they do to them, they make them safe and also suitable for folks with egg allergies. 

2.  Powdered coffee creamer!  I didn't come up with that one, I found it suggested somewhere on the internet during my search for the awesome power that is Orange Julius.

3.  Ditch the water and replace it with whole milk or half and half - and then add applesauce in place of the eggs.  This one follows the logic that folks with egg allergies can often substitute applesauce for eggs in baked goods such as cornbread, etc.  Banana puree also works, as well as tofu!  There are actually many egg alternatives out there, and all you have to do is visit your good friend Google.  

For the sake of today's blog, I'm using half and half plus banana.  I'm not brave enough to trust the raw eggs in my refrigerator.  This makes me sad, but as a working mom, I can't risk being out of commission for that long.  

I started with these extremely happy foods:

I have a fancy shmancy juicer though...you could probably just use regular orange juice.  With this kind of juicer you can even juice the peels - you would be surprised at how many nutrients are in fruit rinds, and when I'm making juice just for myself, I don't peel most things.  For the sake of authenticity, however, I peeled the oranges first.  

After I cleaned out the juicer and put it away, I got my Ninja out from the kitchen appliance abyss.  (Everybody has one of those, right?  The abyss, not the Ninja.  Ninjas are pretty cool though.)  

(This picture demonstrates how I feel about a lot of things today.  Just appreciate the subtleties.)

A regular blender works just fine too, and in fact probably better, since my Ninja is the small variety which is better used for making things like dip and chopping onions when I'm feeling lazy, than it is for a drink that's supposed to be about the same consistency throughout.  But with my 3-year-old operating it, he made sure to get the job done.  

The finished product!  Look at all the frothy goodness.  I added an extra half a banana (that means one and a half total) at the end to make sure it foamed up nicely.  

Finally, if you live in the Northeast like I do, there's probably a ton of snow on the ground.  Therefore, I highly recommend adding a tiny umbrella to your drink. 

Because umbrella.  

In summation, the recipe I ended up using in the end was:

About 2 cups fresh squeezed orange juice

3/4 cup half and half (though whole milk would probably have been better)

1 1/2 bananas

About 1/2 cup of ice (give or take)

....and one umbrella.  

And...it was awesome.  Tastes like Teen Spirit.