Poco Mountain Girl

Behold the juice.

Since I got my new juicer, I’ve been experimenting with every juiceable ingredient I can find around here. This concoction resulted from the veggies and fruits pictured below: carrot, celery, beet, parsley, cilantro, lemon, lime, green apple, and ginger root.

It was really delicious, and I got such a swirl of energy (probably from the beet) that I was a little tipsy for a minute after drinking it. 🙂

I also made a juice where I subbed greens for the carrots and apple to cut down on the sugar rush. I used romaine lettuce and collard greens along with the other ingredients from the first juice. I needed to add a little stevia to sweeten it, but it was pretty good.

The great thing about drinking fresh, raw juices is that the nutrients are instantly assimilated without any the work of digestion. You can also get tons more nutrients in just one drink than you could by eating whole raw veggies all day – your body just couldn’t really get through that kind of volume.

Juicing is awesome for giving your body a cleansing, healing rest. People are doing 92-day juice fasts and having awesome results – they actually call it juice feasting because they aren’t depriving their bodies of calories – just substituting juices for food.

Although I love having this juicer, I’m less than satisfied with the amount of juice it extracts. This 4-cup measure is what came out of the veggies pictured above. It’s not terribly small, but definitely much less than I could get from the Omega 1000 juicer I left in KC. I think the key was that its spinning basket held the pulp and continued to spin out the juice as I kept juicing, rather than shooting the pulp out as soon as the veggies were put in, as the new one does. The pulp from that one was much drier; with this one I can actually squeeze out juice from the leftover pulp with my hand. And although I have aspirations to use the pulp in recipes, I’m finding that I can’t keep up with all the roughage that comes from the amount of juice I use.

I did try running the pulp through the juicer a few more times, with good results. By putting it through 3 more times, I extracted about 20% more juice. The leftover pulp was still fairly wet, believe it or not, but it would be more usable in raw recipes like dehydrated crackers and pizza dough, because it is more ground up.

I’ve cooked up 2 batches of leftover pulp so far. I made this potassium broth by boiling the pulp along with an onion, a few cloves of garlic, and some thickly-cut organic potato skins. I boiled it for about 20 minutes then strained out the veggies and added a fresh lime. It was yummy and I’ll definitely keep making it, but not at the rate I make juice.

In my search for an efficient juicer without getting into lux pricing, I’ve heard the Breville Fountain juicer is pretty good, and I know the Omega is great, but it has it’s downfalls, too – such as a small food chute, jumping around all over the counter, and spurting juice all over the floor.

If you’ve found a juicer you’re happy with, I’d like to hear about it!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2011 at 7:19 am and is filed under Happy Healthy Hippie Food, Making Stuff, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.