Getting The Most From Your Juicing Experience

So, you have decid­ed that you were going to start juic­ing; you have done your research, put in your due dili­gence, assessed your needs vs. wants, and pur­chased your juicer…

Now that the easy part is out of the way, you can move on to the more dif­fi­cult part. Although it seems straight­for­ward, you will just juice fruits and veg­eta­bles. But you are also going to learn a few ways to MAXIMIZE your invest­ment toward your health. There are a few dif­fer­ent ways that this can be accomplished.

First, the style of juicer you have will affect it is ver­sa­til­i­ty and what oth­er func­tions you can per­form. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly the brand name or any­thing, but the spe­cif­ic extrac­tion method your juicer uses, whether it is a cen­trifu­gal juicer, mas­ti­cat­ing juicer, sin­gle auger hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal (yes, their func­tion­al­i­ty has a few dif­fer­ences), or twin screw. Now, that being said, let’s try to dis­close some knowl­edge or some ideas!

What To Do With Pulp

Extract­ing juice from qual­i­ty ingre­di­ents is usu­al­ly worth $5.00-$7.00 or more at a time, so it makes sense that you want to get every­thing you can. Let’s start from the top with this one and see where we end up. First of all, you must know that NO juicer in the world is 100% effi­cient at extract­ing the juice. There will always be an inher­ent amount of mois­ture left in the fiber, but the qual­i­ty and style of the juicer will either increase or decrease the num­ber of micronu­tri­ents left behind in your pulp.

Option #1 Is Processing Your Pulp Again

Even if it may sound bizarre, there are high-val­ue pro­duce items that you would REALLY use to the last drop. An excel­lent exam­ple of this would be wheat­grass. The yields on leafy greens and grass­es are very low so run­ning it through your machine again makes per­fect sense.

How­ev­er, soft pulp such as kiwis and cucum­bers are absolute­ly unsuit­able for repeat­ed extrac­tion. Sim­ply because the pulp for soft ingre­di­ents has a gooey or sticky mess con­sis­ten­cy, and if your sec­ond time runs it through a juicer, it will not change its texture.

This process also is NOT RECOMMENDED for any­one using a cen­trifu­gal-style juicer. The rea­son is that they are the least effi­cient at juice extrac­tion out of all the dif­fer­ent styles and because they rely on a mesh bas­ket to extract the juice from the whole pro­duce, you will sim­ply clog the mesh with the pulp, and noth­ing will hap­pen. Of course, if you have a Welle’s Press or any oth­er pulp press, it goes with­out say­ing that you can just press all of your pulp and REALLY get every­thing out.

Option #2 Is to Making Homemade Vegetable Stock

You can take all the veg­etable pulp (not fruit) and store it in ZipLock bag­gies in the freez­er until you have a good amount. So, when you get a good amount saved up in the freez­er, you can fill up a pot of water and brings it to a boil. Then add all his veg­etable pulp and boils the crap out of it for about 30 min­utes or even longer. The “pulp-to-water” ratio is kind of con­vo­lut­ed and hazy, and you should have a “feel” for it. You can use the home­made stock for dif­fer­ent veg­e­tar­i­an or veg­an soups, which is pret­ty good. It has a dif­fer­ent fla­vor than Swan­son’s veg­etable stock.

Option #3 is DehydratIng Your Pulp

You can find TONS of recipes for veg­an snacks where the recipe revolves around juiced fruit pulp. There are also a few car­rot cake recipes with car­rot shreds after juic­ing. And there is real­ly no lim­it to what you can do with the pulp in a recipe. Just bear in mind that there will be some resid­ual taste in the pulp after the extrac­tion process, so make sure you blend your fla­vors care­ful­ly. For exam­ple, do not use apple pulp to make your veg­etable stock or any­thing. Some peo­ple dehy­drate the pulp, put it in a blender, and pul­ver­ize it once it is dry to act as a fiber addi­tive in what­ev­er it is that they want to put it in; it is sim­ply like a nat­ur­al Metamucil.

Option #4 Is Composting It!

What bet­ter way to use your pulp than return it from whence it came? I know it sounds real­ly hip­pie, but it is true. I also can not think of a bet­ter way to nour­ish your gar­den than the micronu­tri­ents offered by fruits and veg­eta­bles. But, unfor­tu­nate­ly, worms also eat this stuff up (lit­er­al­ly).

Homogenizing

Well, how does this apply to a juicer? If you have a mas­ti­cat­ing or auger juicer, you may have an extra attach­ment that came in the pack­age with your juicer called a homog­e­niz­ing blank noz­zle. What hap­pens when you install your homog­e­niz­ing noz­zle is quite sim­ple: every­thing that goes in will come out. No sep­a­ra­tion or extrac­tion is hap­pen­ing. Your pro­duce gets mauled, crushed, and pul­ver­ized by the mechan­ics of the juicer, and it spits it all out togeth­er. You can make apple/pear chut­ney sauce or sauce with pineap­ple and gar­lic. The most pop­u­lar thing to do is either make banana “ice cream” with it or stuff like raw apple sauce. You sim­ply take a peeled frozen banana for the banana ice cream and homog­e­nize it. It has the con­sis­ten­cy of thick, soft-serve ice cream.

Addi­tion­al­ly, your homog­e­niz­ing noz­zle can also be used to do oth­er stuff, such as grind grains into rough flour and grind fresh cof­fee beans for coffee.

Extrusion

Some juicers have what are called “extru­sion tips,” which are typ­i­cal­ly paired with the homog­e­niz­ing noz­zle. Extru­sion is forc­ing mate­r­i­al through an ori­fice to get the desired shape. The most straight­for­ward exam­ple of this is noo­dles or ground beef. You put your meat into a meat grinder, and the meat is ground up and forced through a plate full of small holes. That is an extru­sion attach­ment. It forms the meat into what we know as “ham­burg­er”. Some juicers can do this, but the most typ­i­cal appli­ca­tion is noo­dles. You would mix up your dough for your noo­dles and feed it through your chute that has the homog­e­niz­ing plate installed along with an extru­sion tip. The auger would force out the dough through the holes, and “voila”, you have fresh spaghetti/linguini/etc for your meal.

Nut Butters and Almond/Soy Milk

Are you get­ting impressed yet? Nut but­ter is best left to the mas­ti­cat­ing sin­gle Auger and Cham­pi­on mas­ti­cat­ing juicers. There are many ways to make almond and soy milk. You cer­tain­ly do not have to have a juicer, but if you have a juicer that can do this, why not take advan­tage of it?

Summary

I hope that who­ev­er reads this is reaf­firmed by their juicer pur­chase at the very min­i­mum. What I am real­ly hop­ing is that I’ve shared with some of your things that you did­n’t think about or did­n’t real­ize that you had the capac­i­ty to do