This vs. that

There are many different juicer models to choose from. Your selection can be based on price (in most cases even an inexpensive juicer is better than no juicing at all) or function. Function? Well yes, juicing is juicing but there are two different main categories of juicer available: centrifugal and masticating. Most people are familiar with centrifugal juicers. They've been around the longest and have been the most available. More recently, masticating juicers have begun to gain popularity.

The difference is in how the ingredients are processed into juice.

With centrifugal juicers, a disc with tiny sharp teeth spinning at high speed shreds fruits and vegetables and the spinning forces the juice through a fine mesh sieve/filter basket, resulting in rapid juicing with almost no pulp. It happens at high speed so there will be some oxidation that occurs, but don't worry about claims of heat from this type of juicing damaging enzymes/nutrients. It doesn't raise the temperature more than 2ºF, and if you are using refrigerated produce, even less reason to worry about that. Centrifugal juicers are faster, louder and use more electricity than masticating juicers.

With masticating juicers, an auger (picture a giant screw) smashes, crushes and grinds up the fruits and vegetables, at a low speed. There are different sized holes in the filter, which allows pulp into the juice. Because the juice is produced at a low speed as the ingredients are crushed, there is little oxidation. Pulp in the juice means you're getting some of the fiber, which is good for you and especially useful if you're using vegetable juice as a meal replacement since fiber helps you feel more "full." Masticating juicers are more quiet and use less electricity, but have smaller feed chutes so you have to cut your fruits and vegetables into smaller pieces.

This is how I cut up items for processing through a centrifugal juicer with a 3" feed chute:

Basically, if it fits in the feed chute you're done. I halve my cucumbers because I put the leafy greens between the two halves to make processing them easier.

This is how I cut up items for processing through a masticating juicer:

Everything is cut into much smaller/thinner  pieces except for the greens. I cut celery into lengths of only two to three inches, which keeps the stringy fibers from getting tangled in the auger.

So — is one type of juicer better than the other? Not necessarily. It really depends on your needs. Centrifugal juicers are faster, and models with big pulp bins make it easy to make a larger quantity of juice, which is great when juicing for two, etc. Masticating juicers are really good at processing delicate leafy things, which is a bit trickier in a centrifugal model. I think if you want to make juice in the morning and have some to take "to go" for later in the day, a masticating model might be better due to the lack of oxidation from low-speed extraction.

I recently switched to a masticating juicer as my primary juicer. I did have some concerns about the additional time I would need to spend both preparing the ingredients and the actual juicing. I've found it takes an extra ten to fifteen minutes (depending on how many ingredients and the quantities) from start to finish vs. with a centrifugal juicer with a wide feed chute.

If you like to juice in the morning but are concerned about time, cut up and prepare your ingredients the night before and keep them in a large plastic zipper bag in the fridge. (If you're using apple, you can rub some fresh lemon on the apple pieces to keep them from turning brown.)

The ingredients in the above photo (6 leaves lacinato "dinosaur" kale, 1 baby bok choy, 1 lemon, 1 large chunk ginger, 1 yellow pepper, 3 stalks celery, 1 fennel bulb, 1seedless cucumber) made about 32 ounces of juice.

I'm pleased that the masticating juicer makes far less noise than my centrifugal juicer, which I'm sure my downstairs apartment neighbors appreciate since I juice early in the morning. It also happens to require less counter space in my kitchen.

Potassium Powerhouse

Who knew? One morning while having a conversation about juicing, variety and nutrients, there was a "what if" moment — what if we juiced a fennel bulb (also known as anise)? Would it be disgusting? The very subtle anise/licorice flavor of fresh fennel is almost as polarizing as that of cilantro: people either love it or hate it. Taste not being the only factor for juicing something, I decided to look up the nutrition data for raw fennel.

What I found was astounding. One 234g fennel bulb contains 969mg of potassium, according to the USDA nutrition database. For someone like me who is combating high blood pressure with nutrition, this was a glorious discovery. Now, a fennel bulb of that size also contains 122mg of sodium, but that's not bad as long as I'm keeping a close eye on the total sodium in my diet. Fennel is also a fantastic source of vitamin C, and a decent source of folate, calcium and iron.

So how did it taste when combined with other ingredients in a juice? Almost imperceptible. We really had to "look for it" in the finished juice. Lemon and ginger easily masked any flavor the fennel might have added.

Here's a green juice recipe (this has become my go-to "Everyday Green" juice):
1 fennel bulb, stalks trimmed off
1 seedless cucumber
4 leaves of lacinato ("dinosaur") kale
1 yellow bell pepper
1 lemon, rind removed
1 chunk of peeled ginger root

You'll be hard-pressed to taste the fennel. If you do and that's not to your liking, simply add another lemon.

Fennel is my new "secret ingredient" packing a potassium punch, that I now add to almost every juice I make.

An easier way

Maybe I actually think of things nobody else has tried? I have watched too many videos and seen too many people do this the wrong way in person — at home and in commercial environments. The problem: juicing leafy greens in centrifugal juicers. It doesn't work well if you just shove them in and expect juice. They are leafy, rather than dense solid items. They hit the spinning teeth and mostly get ejected because there's not enough mass to really get any juice out of them. Yet all these people are pushing greens into their juicers, then saying "you need to follow after with something harder." This approach really doesn't help because by the time you add another ingredient, most of your greens have been shredded but not juiced, and are spun out and now in the pulp container. The answer? Put your leafy greens between other, harder items. Cucumber is perfect for this but you could also use stalks of celery or bok choy (or any other long item that you can surround the greens with — I just happen to prefer using only green items for green juices). By surrounding your leafy greens with something more dense, you are getting all of both to juice successfully.

In this photo there are two halves of a cucumber, with kale leaves wadded up between them. Push all of this gently through, pausing briefly as you go to not overload the juicer's motor. This has become my standard method for juicing leafy greens like kale and swiss chard, because it's so effective.

Tried and true vs. trying new

Although I have my tried-and-true favorite juice combinations, trying something new keeps it interesting. The grocery store had organic bartlett pears on sale for $1.79 a pound, so I thought "why not?" I've never used pears before, and suspected they'd go well with cucumber, ginger and lacinato kale. I did not add my usual lemon because lemon and ginger tend to dominate other flavors. The resulting juice was sweeter of course, but I could distinctly taste the pear and cucumber.

2 small organic bartlett pears (I cut them after taking the photo)*
1 seedless cucumber
3 lacinato ("dinosaur") kale leaves
1 chunk of ginger root (1-inch diameter, 2+ inches long)

* Like apple seeds, pear seeds when crushed or ground and ingested can apparently create trace amounts of cyanide when mixed with stomach acid. Although smaller apples and pears can go into some juicers whole, I don't recommend doing so for this reason.

Organic vs. Conventional Produce

Although eating conventional produce is better than not getting enough fruits and vegetables in your diet, there are many items that you really should strive to ONLY buy organic. If you're juicing daily, you're consuming a lot more produce than you probably had previously. That's great, but if you're consuming non-organic produce that also means you're ingesting more pesticides, fertilizers and fungicides. That's not good.

The Environmental Working Group has two lists that they publish, known as the "Dirty Dozen" and the "Clean 15." You guessed it, items on the "dozen" list should only be purchased when organic is available, as they contained the highest levels of pesticides. The "clean" items you don't need to worry about as much. EWG's web site has updates these lists here.

The current "Dirty Dozen" (and the top three are the worst offenders):

1. Apples
2. Celery
3. Strawberries
4. Peaches
5. Spinach
6. Nectarines (imported)
7. Grapes (imported)
8. Sweet bell peppers
9. Potatoes
10. Blueberries (domestic)
11. Lettuce
12. Kale and collard greens

(Although not on this list, I still only buy organic carrots as well.)

The current "Clean 15":

1. Onions
2. Sweet corn
3. Pineapple
4. Avocado
5. Asparagus
6. Sweet peas
7. Mangoes
8. Eggplant
9. Cantaloupe (domestic)
10. Kiwi
11. Cabbage
12. Watermelon
13. Sweet potatoes
14. Grapefruit
15. Mushrooms

Grapefruit goodness and making the time for juicing

Every now and then I like to try new combinations, even though I have my tried-and-true favorites. This morning's juice featured grapefruit, red bell pepper, granny smith apple, lemon, carrot, ginger, golden beet and tomato. I used one large and one smaller grapefruit. You could really taste the grapefruit over the other ingredients, which was the goal. As you can see below I also used a rather large chunk of ginger root.

The approximate nutritional analysis of this combination (which yielded over a quart of juice, enough for two people) per-person:

Percent Daily Values

Vitamin A: >600%
Vitamin C: >230%
Vitamin E: 14%
Vitamin K1: 40%
Thiamin: 15%
Riboflavin: 14%
Niacin: 15%
Vitamin B6: 27%
Folate: 30%
Calcium: 8%
Iron: 8%
Magnesium: 12%
Potassium: 30%
Sodium: 12% (mostly from the carrots)
Zinc: 5%
Copper: 7%
Manganese: 24%  

Making the time for juicing
I hear people complain that it takes a long time to prep for juicing. I don't think it takes long at all. I don't peel organic carrots or cucumbers. In this morning's juice I peeled the beet and ginger root, and cut the rind off the grapefruits and lemon. Everything else required a minimal amount of rinsing and prep. If I know I will be pressed for time or have to leave earlier than usual in the morning, I'll prep my juice ingredients the night before and store them in a bag in the fridge overnight. To keep apples from turning brown, rub the flesh with the rind-less lemon before putting them in the bag. In the morning, just pull the bag out and you're ready to go.

Martha Stewart does a green juice every day

Martha Stewart Starts Every Day With Green Juice, Seriously Digs Asparagus Season
from Grubstreet New York

"Every morning I drink a green juice made from fresh spinach, parsley, pear, ginger, orange, and cucumber from my farm."

Feeling Good

I'm feeling good. Physically because I've been working out, still juicing every morning and also In the past couple of months I've eaten almost no meat (more on that later*). I'm also feeling good about the happy fact that since I started adding fresh vegetable juice to my diet last summer, I've directly or indirectly inspired more than 6 people to start doing it themselves. Whether because I talked their ears off about all the nutrition they could be getting, or because they can see a big difference in how I look compared to last year, or maybe because they'd thought about doing it and just needed someone they know to evangelize just enough to be the push required to get a juicer and start doing it themselves — whatever the reason, I'm glad they did and I think they are too!

If you're one of those people who started juicing because of me blabbing about it, or because you stumbled across this blog or whatever, how has your experience been? Have you seen or felt a noticeable change in yourself or your partner/spouse? Do you see this as something you'll permanently add to your life? Please, share your thoughts!


* I've all but stopped including meat (beef, pork, chicken, lamb, etc.) in my diet; instead I'm consuming more fish/seafood than I did before.

My heart skipped a beet

Alas, my "rubylicious" recipe isn't the same (especially color-wise) without a beet. I ran out of beets so this morning I have to make up for it in volume with other items, like celery and carrot. A bunch of people around me at work have been sick and I do NOT want whatever they've been having, so I'm using ginger and lemon and as much natural vitamin C as I can pack in to each serving.

Oh my (green) goodness

Even when my juicer was inconveniently located in my kitchen, I never stopped juicing — but I was doing it less at home and buying more freshly made-to-order at a place nearby, and that was getting expensive.

Am renewing my commitment to myself to juice at least twice a day and try to eat mostly raw vegetable foods and less meat. Although I did not intend or care to lose weight by juicing (it's all about the blood pressure for me, as anyone following this blog may recall), I actually have lost about 10–15 pounds. I'm at 135 now, but as I begin doing more workouts with weights that number will go back up due to muscle gain.

This morning's breakfast:





And my nutritional analysis of it (only including items with greater than 10% Daily Value):

190% DV Vitamin A
172% DV Vitamin C
1146% DV Vitamin K1
15% DV Thiamin
21% DV Riboflavin
25% DV Vitamin B6
36% DV Folate
25% DV Calcium
21% DV Iron
39% DV Magnesium
43% DV Potassium
21% DV Copper
45% DV Manganese

And that was just 16 ounces of juice. You can see how easy it is to get enough of your vitamins this way.

Location, Location, Location

Putting your juicer in a place that is easy to get to, especially close to your kitchen sink, is important. I've had to move my juicer temporarily to an inconvenient location in my kitchen, and have actually been juicing less because it's not as easy and quick as having everything in the perfect spot. I'm really busy, so having the cutting board and prep on one side of the sink, with the juicer on the other, and easy clean-up right there, is essential.

One could argue that being really serious about juicing means making it work regardless of environmental circumstances, but the reality is that it's just easier and more likely to happen when all of the variables are ideal.

The cold-buster

I hate being sick. Almost as much as I hate being sick, I hate it when people tell me to drink orange juice. Orange juice usually makes me feel worse, and it doesn't even have that much vitamin C in it — just a lot of sugar.

I made a typical combination juice with beet, red bell pepper, carrot and apple and a couple other things, but added twice as much ginger root and lemon as I normally would. Lemons are a decent source of vitamin C, and ginger root is a natural antiseptic: perfect for my throat after my sinuses/drained down it all night long.



This combination has approximately 494% of the recommended daily amount of vitamin C. Way more than a glass of orange juice. It's also readily absorbed and put to use by the body and therefore better than a vitamin C supplement, in my opinion.

All juicers are not created equal

While on vacation a couple weeks ago, I worried about maintaining my juicing/blood pressure/nutrition away from home. Fortunately I was staying in a rented house with a kitchen, so I just needed to find a juicer. There wasn't much selection in local stores and I ended up with a Jack LaLanne Power Juicer Express:



It really made me appreciate the money I spent on my Breville. Here's why:

• Although this juicer worked, it was mostly white plastic and the first carrot that went through it stained it.


• The spout was mounted very low and I could only fit a very short 8-ounce container under it. The juicer did not come with a pitcher or other juice receptacle. I usually make at least 16 ounces at a time. This meant that in the middle of juicing I'd have to empty the small container into a larger one, which was inconvenient and messy.


• It was underpowered. Sure, the packaging touted it as "whisper quiet" which of course it was not, though it was certainly quieter than my Breville. But less noise meant it also took four to five times longer to juice the same amount of vegetables I can put through my Breville in under a minute. (Total juicing plus clean-up time averaged 30 minutes, versus 20 or less with my Breville model.)


• It did not come with a cleaning brush, and the design of the centrifugal basket makes it very difficult to clean without one.


• Hard items like beets caused juice to splatter rather than flow from the pour spout, which made a big mess and required extra clean-up.

On the plus side, at $100 it costs a third what my Breville did, so if you don't plan to juice more than once a day, and you don't mind extra clean-up, fewer accessories, and extra time spent juicing due to less power, it's not a bad juicer.

That said, it was nice to come home to my juicer.

Color

I've said this before, but it bears repeating — especially for newbies who are turned off by funky-colored juice.

If you juice things that are similar in color, you'll get better-looking juices. In other words, don't combine green things with red or very orange things, unless you're okay with muddy, swampy juice colors. Keep red and orange ingredients together, and green ingredients together.

For example:



The celery doesn't really impact the color because it's so light — but I would avoid chard, kale or anything else with a darker green color.

This combination produced a beautiful bright orange juice.

actually "garden fresh"

My friend Gail gave me cucumbers and kale from her amazing garden. Doesn't get any more organic or fresh than pulled right off the vine/plant in a personal garden!

I prepared my usual green combo (cucumber, the greens, apple, ginger, lemon) with them. It made me wish I had my own garden — I'd save so much money in the summer.

Being dense is good

Nutritionally dense, that is. Green leafy things in particular are packing a lot.



1 whole unpeeled organic cucumber (from a friend's garden!)
2 stalks bok choy
2 leaves swiss chard
1 organic granny smith apple
1 whole lemon (rind removed)
1.5-inch chunk fresh ginger root

The above ingredients yielded about 16 ounces of juice, which according to my calculations contains the following "daily values based on a 2,000-calorie diet":

238% Vitamin A
216% Vitamin C
10% Vitamin E
1084% Vitamin K
13% Thiamin
20% Riboflavin
8% Niacin
28% Vitamin B6
34% Folate
25% Calcium
23% Iron
37% Magnesium
37% Potassium
8% Sodium
8% Zinc
18% Copper
43% Manganese
3% Selenium

And it doesn't taste like a liquified salad, thanks to the lemon, ginger and apple.

How could you possibly?

How could you possibly eat all this for breakfast?

2 stalks of bok choy, 2 stalks of celery, 2 swiss chard leaves, a beet, a red bell pepper, 2 carrots and 2 tomatoes.

It's amazing how much you'd have to actually eat to get enough vitamins and minerals in your diet. I don't think it would be possible for most people — you'd be eating all day long!

Another observation is that people have no problem eating a vegetable soup or stew that is this color:


(kinda fun how it came out of the juicer and formed these layers)


(after mixing it all together)

Yet when a juice is this color, it turns people off. When I began juicing my first reaction to these colors was not revulsion, but "is this going to taste okay?" I guess it's because Americans are so conditioned to think that "juice" = bright and only certain colors. I got a green juice to go from Protein Bar last week and as I walked down the street I noticed people looking at it. One guy even nudged his friend and pointed, as if I were drinking a puréed monster. You just don't see a lot of bright green liquids being ingested by humans, so it doesn't look "normal." Think outside the juice box, people!

My V7 is better than your V8

In fact, my V4 and V5 probably are too. But I wanted to get the number closer to the name-brand product just to be more than fair.

People seem to think that drinking store-bought vegetable juices is "good enough" when it comes to nutrition. The truth is, they are better for you than fruit juices or soda, unless you have high blood pressure, as they are typically loaded with sodium — more on that in a bit. But they simply cannot compare to the amount of nutrition you get from freshly juiced raw vegetables. An important word in that statement is "raw" — commercially prepared juices are often pasteurized, a heating process that destroys much of the nutrients.

An 8-ounce serving of regular V8 has a fifth of the recommended daily intake of sodium. The manufacturers recognize how ridiculously high in sodium their normal products are, and have created "low sodium" versions. The good news about these, especially for the blood-pressure-conscious, is that the sodium is replaced with potassium chloride.

Regardless of the sodium or potassium content, processed bottled or canned vegetable juices have a fraction of the nutrients of fresh raw vegetable juice. How big of a difference is there? The combination of seven items pictured above (carrot, plum tomato, beet, bok choy, celery, red pepper and onion) yields about 16 ounces of juice. The "serving size" for store-bought juice is 8 ounces. So for comparison purposes, I halved the data for the fresh juice. Also, when juiced you get about 95% of the nutrients, so I take that into account. The fresh raw juice still beats the processed stuff, by far:



All of the data used in this comparison was sourced from nutritiondata.self.com. The fresh raw juice also includes 1/2 teaspoon of potassium chloride in the 16-ounce total, or 1/4 teaspoon per 8-ounce serving.

The flavor of this fresh raw juice is very similar to the store-bought processed stuff. The texture, however, is much thinner — it isn't "pulpy" at all. As such, it doesn't make a very good base for a bloody mary mix. For that, I'll stick with V8. For nutrition, the raw juice wins.

Ruby Tuesday

The color of this morning's juice was sure to be bright — in fact it was a beautiful ruby red. But I worried it was going to be too sweet for my taste, with a beet, a red pepper AND carrots. So I threw in an apple and a lemon and that was just enough tartness to give the juice some tanginess. It's funny to me how many people say they don't like beets. I've actually "converted" a few people by including beets in other things like roasted vegetables with garlic and herbs. Even if you swear you don't like the taste of beets at all, you wouldn't taste it in this particular recipe. This one was so good, it's going on the recipes page.

Rubylicious

1 red beet, peeled
2 medium-large carrots
1 red bell pepper, seeds/core removed
1 whole lemon, rind removed
1 pink lady apple (any red apple would work, but these are more tart)

I almost felt guilty

I almost felt guilty juicing half of a rather large organic yellow heirloom tomato. But then I realized, this is what tomatoes should be all the time! We're just used to eating crappy boring tomatoes, so these seem extra special.

We ate half of it last night sliced, and I saved the rest. It had almost no seeds and was nearly solid flesh. Wonderful flavor. I didn't want to waste the remainder — far too expensive — so I kept it covered overnight, which is about as long as you can with a fresh ripe tomato that's been cut. (You should never put tomatoes in the refrigerator. It ruins their texture.)

The leftover half was so big, I had to cut it to fit into the juicer's already large feed tube.





2 carrots
2 stalks bok choy
1 red bell pepper
half of large yellow heirloom tomato
1/4 teaspoon potassium chloride