My First Juicer
Several weeks ago I took the plunge to buy my first ever juicer. I had been thinking of purchasing a juicer for a while, but a juicer to me was one of those kitchen appliances that other people had and rarely used.
I love freshly squeezed juices but I’m a bit of a traditionalist, I like my OJ the same way I like my relationships, straight and fresh. And that’s about the extent of my experimentation, juicing or otherwise. Now smoothies on the other hand, I’ll take those kinky. I’ll try making a smoothie with pretty much anything at least once.[1]
Having just destroyed my third blender in two years (don’t ask) I went to the local Sears for a new one and to browse the juicers at the same time. The selection of juicers that Sears had available wasn’t great and I was in two minds of whether to buy a Hamilton Beach juicer for around $55 or the Breville for around $75. I wasn’t happy with the build quality of either of them but I figured this would be my first juicer, I’d get it, try the device out for a month or two, if I found I was making good use of the appliance to justify an upgrade I could always purchase a more capable juicer in a few months.
My girlfriend spotted the Jack Lalanne Juicer, which I had never heard of, no surprise really as I hadn’t done much in terms of researching the different types of juicers. Of all the juicers I had researched, this particular Sears only stocked one of them, and the juicer had a very negative rating, and any other juicer reviews I could remember right then and there were for multi-hundred dollar machines.
My girlfriend had obviously seen the infomercial at some point in time for the Jack Lalanne so after breaking open the box and reading through the manual and looking at the parts and build quality of the store display model I decided to take a gamble on it. If this one didn’t suit my needs, I could upgrade in a couple of months. If I don’t make use of the juicer very much, I’ll donate it to charity.
The blender I bought I was also very happy with. Sears had a sale going on – in January of all things! Who would have thought it? I was able to purchase a high-end Cuisinart blender for under a hundred dollars. This blender, compared to the others I’ve owned, including the high-end one I destroyed over Christmas while making a traditional roast dinner, is built like a tank, plus the Cuisinart website lists all of the replacement parts right there on the web page for when I no doubt destroy this blender.[2]
Having used the Jack Lalanne Juicer on a daily basis for a little over a month I am very happy with the purchase. I am sure that there are better juicers out there, but for a juicing neophyte such as me, who was really just looking for something to supplement my own smoothie making habits, it’s an ideal addition.
Now the main goal of purchasing a juicer is for me to reach my larger goal of maintaining a yearly increase in raw food consumption.
In the past few years I’ve made some great strides in ascertaining what I should and shouldn’t eat. Removing a lot of the really bad stuff and putting back a lot of good stuff.
I consciously removed all soda in 2003.
Reduced my coffee intake by 9%% in October of 2004. I went cold turkey for two months and that brought on a two day headache that no amount of Aspirin would quell.
I’ve sought to eradicate conscious consumption of high fructose corn syrup in July of 2008 though there isn’t much I can do if I eat food at a restaurant that used a product containing it.
I have cut out 95% of pre-packaged meals and food products unless I know what went in to them such as the pre-packaged own-brand fresh meals from supermarkets such as Fresh & Easy or Whole Foods.
I’ve always been a picky eater when it comes to meats and other suspicious animal by-products, and whilst I like a lot of processed foods in my diet, I think that there is just too much in the average American diet.
My raw food intake is at about a consistent 25% of my diet right now but my final goal for January 2011, at this time, is a 75% raw diet.
I don’t see myself giving up certain cooked foods or processed comfort foods at this time but as I move more towards a purely raw diet I suspect my dietary goal will change.
It is actually interesting to observe that as I give up various foods that are not at all good for me, and exchange them with other foods, many friends and employees are also following right along with me. It’s like they are ready to do it too, but they just need someone else to take the plunge first.
Perhaps it is a societal normalcy thing?
If everyone else around you is doing it, it’s normal. I still get several people though who cause societal drag on my choices but they are fortunately few and far between, plus I tend not to listen to them anyway.
Fresh Juice Is Expensive To Buy
I’ve gone through periods where I would drink fresh squeezed juice every single day from a local cafe on my morning walk. The cost of these juice drinks rapidly adds up until you realise you are spending upwards of $150 to $250/month for fresh juice.
If I want to experiment with other juices, I’m spending a lot of money to find out whether I like a particular mixture. And once I’ve purchased an entire glass of juice, I’m feeling obligated to drink it, whether I like it or not. A juice blend that might be fine to sip in a small quantity turns sickeningly and cloyingly sweet or possesses a chokingly fibrous texture when you have to consume an entire glass of it.
I’ve found that apple added to any of the subtler berry smoothies, e.g. a strawberry, raspberry and blackberry blend, can quickly overwhelm the flavour of the berries if not carefully controlled so you might as well be drinking an apple smoothie at that point. A characteristic not in apple’s favour is that a lot of apple fibre in a rough blended smoothie just doesn’t have a good oral texture.
The local cafe where I get my juices and smoothies has a rather bland menu when it comes to what they’ll put in it. There are the usual apples, bananas, berries and oranges but if I want to experiment with different types of melons or exotic fruits I’m going to have to make my own plans. Plus the hired help working there isn’t always perfectly conscious of what proportions to use when making a particular drink.
By making my own juices I can try different fruits and vegetables whenever the mood takes me that the local cafe doesn’t provide for. I’ll get to try not only an orange juice, but different types of oranges, I’m already noticing that the smaller locally grown organic oranges produce less juice than the large Navel oranges but also that the organic oranges have a different flavour to them. So whilst I can try fruits and veggies outside of what the local cafe will provide, I can also try different types of the same fruit.
No Chain Food Factory Juice
One of the primary motivations for having my own juicer is that I want to know what goes in to it, and control the quantities. Purchasing juices and smoothies from the large commercial factories such as Jamba Juice, all I’m effectively doing is buying an over-priced soda most of the time.
There are healthy ingredients in the drinks, there are healthy options on the menu, but unless you sit and analyze every drink they produce you aren’t able to get the healthy option most of the time. I don’t need added sherbet, yoghurt, sugar, syrups, jelly babies and who only knows what else being poured in to my juice drinks.
Never having used a juicer before but obviously being familiar with blenders I honestly thought the noise from the juicer would be louder than it is. Other than the occasional "clunk" from the juicer when it chews up a particularly tough piece of vegetable or fruit this particular juicer is quieter than when my espresso machine is warming up.
This thing is quiet enough that when there is nothing being juiced it’s barely above a mechanical whisper, certainly quieter than the extractor fan on the microwave, and when actually juicing something up the juicer isn’t the one making the noise so much as the fruit dancing around in the feed chute.
When I brought this juicer home, and based on the say so of my girlfriend, who obviously had seen the infomercial at some point, I had to find out who this Jack Lalanne guy is and what he is known for. Okay, so I feel physically inadequate after browsing his website.
As I write this Mr Lalanne is 94-ish with the constitution of a 30 year old. As I am just getting over a bad bout of influenza I am feeling particularly weak and flabby. And here’s me using the influenza as an excuse not to go to the gym for a week.[3]
I don’t watch television anymore so I’ve obviously never seen the infomercial. If television is the opiate of the masses then infomercials are the snack food you eat afterwards. Let’s just say, I don’t think I was missing much by not seeing the infomercial.
I was rather leery of purchasing the juicer at first, celebrity endorsements and even worse, products purportedly designed and marketed by celebrities are items to be avoided. I can only think of one thing worse than either of those two put together and that is having "As Seen On TV" emblazoned "proudly" across the box.
For reasons to do with perception of product quality and the type of audience that purchase these products, the phrase "As Seen on TV" has a huge negative connotation for a lot of people, myself included. Ignoring anything else to do with the phrase the biggest issue is really the quality of the merchandise itself.
To date I have been very happy with the juicer I bought and would certainly consider replacing it with an identical model should it break down in the course of using it over the next couple of years.
What About The Pulp?
Each time I juice up a bunch of fruit I am left with a stack of pulp in the collection bin. I’m wondering if this pulp could be consumed and how to go about doing it. The little booklet that came with the juicer doesn’t go in to much detail covering the use of the pulp other than making a few overtures towards cooking with it. I’m usually suspicious of the little recipe booklets that come with appliances as they are often self-serving and rarely if ever offer any worthwhile culinary advice.
Right now I am disposing of the pulp but once I figure out a slightly longer term storage solution for pulp I think I will begin cooking with some of it. I can certainly use some of the citrus pulp in omelettes and stir fry recipes and also for creating orange glazes for various dishes. For other vegetables such as cucumber I can again use that in a stir fry recipe. I am sure there are a few cake recipes I can devise that will use various fruit pulps too.
If anybody has recipes that make use of pulp and you’ve actually had occasion to try them out, not just something you read on a website somewhere, I’d certainly be interested in hearing about them. Maybe if I can get enough recipes together I can publish them on this website in a dedicated collection.
Should I peel the fruit? I’ve now watched the mind-numbing infomercial and a few others besides on how to best use this particular style of juicer and whilst much of the usage seems to expound just throwing in the fruit whole I am finding that the flavouring of the juice is altered considerably when leaving the skins intact.
Now I understand that the skin of the fruit and vegetables can contain extra nutrients not included in the flesh but I haven’t found any particular evidence other than purely anecdotal that supports this. I can’t say I dislike the taste of the juices when making it with produce that has not had the skin removed but it alters the flavour, and I am also thinking that the skins may well contain more than just potentially good nutrients, the skins may also contain harmful chemicals absorbed from ground water, pesticides — intentional or unintentional usage — and other chemicals present in the environment.
Also, if I leave the skins on then the fruit needs to be thoroughly washed to ensure any bacteria or other environmental detritus is removed.
Juicers aren’t just for fruit
Currently I am not being very adventurous with my juicing efforts. I’m sticking mostly to fruits that I am familiar with and enjoy the taste of. The purpose of obtaining a proper juicer was to get used to the idea of juicing at home, see if it was a sustainable habit for me, and slowly increase the variety of produce that I juice. I know that juicers aren’t just for fruit and there are all sorts of other produce I can pass through this device but at this time I am only a few weeks in to ownership and I wanted to give myself a good thirty days before getting adventurous with what I juice.
Again it comes down to feeling my way through what is for me unexplored and uncharted territory. Recipes and suggestions are definitely gratefully received but if you haven’t personally tried a recipe or made use of a suggestion you’re giving I won’t be all that inclined to try it myself.
I’m not a great believer in liquid only diets, other than being mostly a fad that people go through, from my research, liquid only diets seem to offer a very poor nutritional basis for living. A diet where a significant percentage of your nutrients are taken as liquids is fine, but I am convinced I won’t be switching to a liquid only diet at any time in the future. Not unless I want to put the chemicals in my body seriously out of whack.
I am wondering, based on how much juice I can produce from a piece of produce, how much juice is too much juice. I know that drinking two large glasses of orange juice is the equivalent of eating three large Navel oranges, and some may consider that too much, but eating three oranges is a small snack for me quite often. I’ll happy cut up several orange, apples, pears and other fruit and consume them over the course of an hour.
Okay, I drink a lot more juice a lot quicker than eating the equivalent amount of fruit.
But how much is too much?
If the fruit contains only simple fructose sugars I’m not worried about that being unhealthy. Nor am I concerned about too many calories being consumed either. Caloric intake is not indicative of an unhealthy or healthy life style. Quality of calories is more important than the calories themselves.
It’s a bit like reviewing video games. You can take the most amazing video game ever produce, write a two thousand word review on it, and then your editor will want you to sum up all of your experiences in to a single number between the values of 1 and 5.
So how does that work again?
How can you take something so complex and assign it some arbitrary number?
And the same goes for food intake too.
So I’m consuming massive amounts of fruit per day.
Does this make my lifestyle unhealthy?
And I’m also consuming vast quantities of calories too. Usually in a single sitting.
And my weight and my BMI haven’t fluctuated much beyond what they normally would without the juicing. I am thinking that if I sustain this particular way of consuming food, with a hefty portion of it coming through raw smoothies and raw juices, my daily caloric intake will actually increase. Based on past experience, research and current diet I doubt that this will have an adverse effect either on my health or my weight.
What I do like about juicing is the fact I can get all of my vitamins and minerals for a healthy life in just a few glasses of juice. I know that the body cannot absorb massive quantities of minerals or vitamins in a single sitting, much like it is unable to absorb a massive influx or sugar or alcohol or caffeine, so taking several juices over the course of a day is actually better than trying to consume a massive amount of juice in a single sitting. This knowledge of being unable to absorb everything in one go also lets me pace myself through the day so that I don’t face this monumental, monotonous task of consuming a vast quantity of juice all at once.
I haven’t been able to independently verify what on the surface seems reasonable advice, don’t prepare too much juice ahead of time as the juice allegedly loses nutrients through chemical breakdown quite rapidly. Now I know that placing certain liquids in a home refrigerator can alter the chemical composition of them in a reasonably short time period, from several hours to a couple of days. But other than anecdotal evidence at this time I cannot say either way whether the admonition to not let juice sit around in the refrigerator and you should consume it as quickly as possible holds any verifiable truth.
One aspect I have noticed of consuming juice that has been prepared 12 or more hours earlier is that the juice "separates." It is the only word I can use to describe the look. Even a pure orange juice will separate, the denser fibres settling to the bottom, the water content sitting on top.
A quick blend fixes the separation for most, but not all, juices, but when you first look at the separated juice in the storage container, it doesn’t look appetizing. After a few experiments I have found that certain fruit juices I can prepare ahead of time, making them more appealing from an efficiency standpoint, other fruit juices are not so great at being preserved for anything more than an hour or so.
Preparation Time
The amount of time to prepare the food for juicing depends on the food type. I like to keep things simple so it is usually one or two fruit types in a single juice. Most of the preparation time is spent cutting off the fruit skins, or slicing it small enough to enter the juicer. For two glasses of juice the prep time is about 10 minutes or so.
I’ve heard other people comment, and observed it myself, that the amount of time it takes to prepare juice can be considerable. I cannot say, at this early stage of experimentation, whether this is true or not. I am not noticing that juice preparation is taking me any more time than if I were cooking a regular meal.
Having said that, I thoroughly enjoy cooking interesting meals, but preparing produce for juicing is probably the most monotonous and boring thing I will do all day next to hand washing dishes. I’ll experiment over the next month or so to see if I can optimize the preparation process.
Most days I prepare and cook at least one full meal, some days I might get the opportunity to make two separate meals. The thing I have noticed with juice preparation, unlike cooking, is that all of the time is concentrated in to a single block of time, prepare the produce, feed it through the juicer or blender, and then clean up afterwards. With cooking I’ll actually get to do other activities in between the preparation and when I finally sit down to eat depending on what the dish is that I am preparing. It is rare for me spend an entire hour preparing, cooking and cleaning up as a non-stop chain of activities.
I am not seeing juicing, much like smoothie making, becoming a large part of my diet unless I consciously choose to dedicate the time to it, or perhaps have my assistant do it, a suggestion which, I am sure, will go down like a lead balloon.
Overall I have to say I am very happy with the purchase of the Jack Lalanne juicer so far. When I feel that I have outgrown this particular juicer and I want something a little more versatile I’ll feel more confident in my specific juicing needs, until that time I’ll see how long it takes me to break a juicer and my new Cuisinart blender.
[1] Maybe not actually anything. I draw the line at bodily fluids and anything that has legs, fins, wings or slithers.
[2] I don’t actually set out to destroy blenders in the kitchen, things, just… happen.
[3] Probably best that I do not visit the gym for a week or two anyway so that I don’t infect anyone. Plus my respiration from the infection won’t let me walk more than a few hundred yards without getting out of breath.