Avast there ye scurvy dogs and maties and…

Oh, hold on. ITLAPD already happened last month. Sorries.

I guess I was just trying to get into the correct frame of mind for this post about making your own vitamin C. I decided to try it out, just in case there was a run on oranges and vitamin C tablets at the supermarket. Hehe… you can never be too careful about scurvy?

I decided to try make a vitamic C powder out of orange peels. Why the peel? Well, if the online information I found about it is to be trusted (famous last words), the peel of a citrus fruit contains the largest amount of the vitamin C - over 50% in some cases.

There are supposed to be a ton of other benefits in orange peel. They usually grind it into a powder and people add it as a supplement to drinks or just eat it straight. But I’m only concerned with the vitamin C part, so I won’t get into everything else.

If you look at the above photo, by all appearances I FAILED miserably to make an orange peel powder. Instead, I made what looks like smashed-up BBQ potato chips. I sort of know what I did wrong now: I didn’t use a coffee grinder to process the dried peel as suggested. But I didn’t have a spare grinder, and I didn’t feel like making my morning coffee smell like oranges for the next year or so.

The process is fairly easy - just remove the peel from oranges (or other citrus fruits like lemons and limes) with a vegetable peeler. It should be in sort of thin strips if possible. I believe you can retain the pith, but I removed a lot of it because I thought it might be too bitter.

Then spread the peels out on a cheesecloth or napkin to dry, making sure that the individual peels don’t touch each other. I used the peel from one orange only as a test and I dried it for about 5 days. But you probably don’t need to dry it for that long.

When the peels are dry, you put them in a coffee grinder and make a powder out of it. As I said before, this is where things went awry. I thought I was so smart, so first I decided to try use a food processor to grind up the peel. Have you ever seen the Carl’s Jr. commercial where the guy is trying to make guacamole by putting an avocado in a blender? This was the equivalent. The peels spun and spun. When I took them out, they looked nearly the same as before I started.

So then, your bright Cheaplander editor decided to try and use a mortar and pestle to grind up the peels to a powder. Needless to say, I think I pulled some sort of important muscle in my arm trying to grind it up. I think an additional problem was that the orange that I got the peel from was an extremely thin-skinned fruit. The peel wasn’t much thicker than a sheet of ordinary paper.

The end result after a lot of arm wrenching was the flakes above that sorta look like crushed Doritos. I have to say that trying to grind up the peel wasn’t all bad - the dried peel emitted a wonderful orange smell that permeated the entire house. I felt like Johnny Chan at the WSOP with his lucky orange. I’m considering using it in an air freshener.

You should store the ground up orange peel in a airtight container. I’ve kept mine even though it didn’t come out very well. The taste in the beginning is VERY citrusy, but over time the strong orange smell dissipates a little. I believe that 1/2-1 tsp of the peel powder is more than enough vitamin C for one day.

I’m definitely going to give it another try, maybe on International Talk Like A Pirate Day next year. i guess you might find it 20,000 times easier just to buy the vitamin C pills over the counter in order to fight off your scurvy. (Incidentally, I think a lot of vitamin C is derived from corn?) But if you happen to have the orange peels (and a spare coffee grinder) just lying around, give it a try and let me know how it goes.