Juicing on a budget part 3 - choosing the right juicer

In part one of this series we looked at the types of juice and produce to use, in part two we looked at where to source our juicing ingredients. In this last in a 3 part series on juicing on a budget we will examine the equipment we can use to make our juicing habits more streamlined and efficient.

Choosing the right juicer can be the key to a happy, efficient juicing process as opposed to a frustrating effort that does not yield the results that you require. Before choosing a juicer you need to assess how you will be wanting to use the juicer:

• how often will you juice?
• how much time can you spend making juice?
• what types of juice do you want to make - fruit / vegetable / wheatgrass / all types?
• what health benefits that you want to achieve from using your juicer?

Ease of use - less waste produce

The easier a juicer is to use the more often you are likely to use it. This means that you are less likely to have produce being stored for more than a few days. This will stop there being so much waste produce being discarded due to it perishing.

Consuming fruit and vegetables in this way also means that you get the extra benefits of greater levels of vitamins and other nutrients from your juices as these levels diminish over time. This is why you should never buy 'reduced to clear' produce for juicing as the old produce will be of poorer nutritional value than fresh produce.

Ease of use can include the following factors

• How small does the produce have to be cut up to fit into the juicers feeding chute
• How quickly can you put produce through the juicer
• How easy is the juicer to assemble / disassemble
• Do you have to change juicing screens to juice different types of produce?
• How easy is the juicer to clean?

Juice yield - how efficient is the juicer at extracting juice?

Your choice of juicer will affect how much juice (juice yield) your juicer will extract. The higher the juice yield your juicer gives, the less produce you will have to use to extract the required amount of juice. This can save on your grocery bills and although it may not seem like a lot for one glass of juice multiply this by the number of times you use your juicer each year and it can quickly add up to become quite a significant saving.

Some juicers are more efficient than others at juicing certain types of produce. An example of this is the hand powered wheatgrass juicers such as the z-star which juices wheatgrass and leafy greens very efficiently but is not so efficient at juicing other produce such as apples.

If you will be juicing only grapefruit and oranges than a citrus juicer may be the most efficient juicer for you as they do a very good job of extracting the maximum juice levels out of citrus fruit but are not much use for juicing vegetables etc. The Champion Juicer is a good all round fruit and vegetable juicer although it does not juice wheatgrass efficiently.

Some juicers such as the Twin health and Green Star come with a number of juicing screens that enable them to juice a wide range of produce with equal efficiency. For instance there may be a soft fruits screen, a vegetable screen and a wheatgrass / leafy greens screen.

Centrifugal juicers are available that eject the pulp automatically, this means the pulp is not held in the juicer for very long and so this could lead to the pulp being ejected before much juice could be extracted from it. To combat this pulp-ejecting centrifugal juicers spin at a much higher speed than non pulp-ejecting machines so that more centrifugal force is applied to the pulp in an effort to extract as much juice as possible in the short time the pulp is in the juicer.

Cheap juicers don't always work out cheap

There are plenty of cheap juicers on the market and many of these will make an excellent starting point when entering the world of juicing. However in the long run they may not work out to be as cheap as expected as the motors tend to wear out and quicker and the resilience of the parts tend to be less than more expensive models that come with a higher standard of build quality. Cheap models often come with a short warranty on their motor and parts.

Juicing doesn't have to cost the earth

Hopefully in this series of articles we have given you an idea of how juicing is entirely possible on a budget and you can save money in a number of ways including choosing the right types of produce that is in season, sourcing your juicing produce from the right place and choosing the juicer that is most suited to your individual requirements.