Buying a Juicer

Fresh fruit and vegetable juices are inexpensive and packed with nutrients. Everyone knows that we should try to eat more fruits and vegetables to improve our health, and juicing is perfect to improve your daily intake of fruits and vegetables. A daily dose of various fruits and vegetable combinations will ensure that your body receives its full quota of vitamins and minerals.

Although there are plenty of juices on the supermarket shelves, they bear little resemblance in nutrition or taste to those you make in a juicer. There are a few freshly squeezed juices available to buy on the supermarkets and you can do with them if you don’t want to spend money on a juicer. However, I promise you that once you’ve taste real juice you will never want to drink shop bought juices again.

Juicing fruits and vegetables is considered a healthy habit. You can make your own juice with a blender or food processor only if there is a separate attachment, otherwise the machine will make a puree of the fruits and vegetables.

A proper juicer separates the pulp from the juice (centrifugal juicer) or grinds the produce at a low speed to remove the juice from the pulp (masticating juicer). There are plenty of juicers in the market, they vary in prices and ways of juicing.

1. The price. Prizes range from affordable to very expensive. If you are just starting to juice I would advice you to aim at the cheaper end until you are 100% sure that juicing is for you. If you enjoy juicing you can invest in a more sophisticated model later on.
2. How trouble free is it? Is it easy to disassemble to clean? Make sure that your juicer is easy to clean and simple to put together. There is nothing worse than having to read a juicer’s user manual every time you want to have a juice.
3. How does it juice? Is that the best system for the type of fruit or vegetable that you will be using most often? A masticating juicer would be best for juicing leafy vegetables while a centrifugal juicer works best for most fruits.

There are a number of different types of juicers, the most common are:

1. Citrus juicers
2. Centrifugal juicers.
3. Masticating Juicer.
4. Hydraulic juice press

This is the simplest type of juicer. It is suitable only for citrus fruits like lemons, oranges and grapefruits. You can buy a simple plastic squeezer or invest in an electric squeezer if you have trouble gripping the fruit tightly enough.

The Metrokane Mighty OJ Manual Juicer, Chrome -on the right- Is the perfect partner to kick start your day with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Easy to use and easier to clean than most electric juicers.

Just put your glass under the juicer, place half an orange on the raised cone, hold the juicer foot for leverage, and press the handle down. You will see you glass filling up with juice.

The main downside to manual juicers is the range of fruits and veggies that they can juice, usually citrus fruits only.

This type of juicer grates fruits and vegetables into tiny pieces and spins it around at high speed with the liquid being extracted by centrifugal force. It separates the fibrous pulp from the juice.

Centrifugal juices tend to be cheaper in price. They produce thick juices and wet pulp.

This model extracts a great deal more juice from your fruits and vegetables than the centrifugal juicer. This type of juicer tears up fruit and vegetables and forces the pulp against a mesh. This juicer is slower than a centrifugal juicer but extracts more juice offering a higher nutritional content. Usually it is more expensive and much bigger than a centrifugal juicer.

A masticating juicer is especially good at juicing green leafy vegetables such as wheatgrass, spinach, parsley, etc.

This type of juicer squeezes fruits and vegetables to extract the juice. This machine are usually the most expensive ones but also are the ones who offer a better nutritional value from fruits. Utilizing this method will extract more volume, more enzymes, minerals and nutrients from your fruits.

The Breville BJE200XL Compact Juice Fountain is the number 1 best seller juicer in Amazon.com. Why? Mostly because it is so powerful that can handle most fruits and vegetables without any problem.

Another good point about the Breville juicer is its neat design and the easiness to assemble and disassemble for cleaning.

This juicer makes juicing easy and not a hassle.

• Prepare to buy lots of fruits and vegetables. Juicing takes large quantities of vegetables and fruits to make a small amount of juice. I usually juice most of our surplus fruits and vegetables from the garden as it is the best way to use enormous amounts of fruits before they start to get too old. But if you don't produce your own fruits and veggies you should be prepared to buy large amounts of them to make a small amount of juice.

• Juicing Takes Time. All the shopping, preparing, juicing and cleaning does take some extra time. This is the worst part for me about juicing, as it can be tedious to prepare all the fruits and veggies for juicing. When I juice apples I might take a big part of the afternoon first picking up the apples from the garden, separating the ones for eating and the ones for juicing, washing them, cutting them and finally juicing them and storing the juice in bottles. However, the apple juice that comes as a result is simply heavinly, it has no comparison to shop-bought juices.