Tips & Tricks

1: Pick fruit to juice that is not yet fully ripe, it will yield more juice per item than a fully ripe piece of fruit. 

2: If you are using a green, juice it FIRST! Greens (spinach, kale, mustard greens, beet greens etc.) have a very dense juice. The dense and slow moving greens need to have the chance to be washed out of your juicer by the more liquid and quickly moving items in your recipe. 

3: If you are using cucumbers or lettuce in a juice, use them LAST. They will wash out the residual juices from other items that you put through your juicer because they have a very high water content and produce thin juice. 

4: If you are juicing citrus fruit use a citrus juicer. It is convenient to just throw them in your regular juicer, but you lose a lot of the potential juices when you do this! 

5: Cut your juice with WATER!!!! Yes, you are drinking a lot of liquid already and that should keep you hydrated, but it is important that you get good old H2O in too! It is recommended that you either cut your juice with water, or drink a glass of water prior to drinking your juice if you do not like the taste of "diluted" juice. BONUS: When you dilute your juice, it lasts twice as long which cuts your cost in half! 

6: Always peel your citrus fruit (unless you are using a citrus juicer or you like the bitter taste)... Or any other item that you think should probably be peeled. I know that this will be obvious advice to some, but maybe not to others, so just do it! There are a lot of nutrients in the peel of a fruit or veggie, but they add a very bitter taste to the juice. If you don't mind the bitter then you can juice it with the rind or peel still on!

7: ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS WASH YOUR PRODUCE BEFORE JUICING!  Even if you are going organic, your produce came out of the ground, off of a bush, or from a tree and you NEVER know what has happened to your produce before it ended up in your kitchen! I recently found a slug in my kale while washing it and a dead grasshopper in my lettuce... I also recently watched a woman sneeze, pick up a bell pepper, drop it and then set it back in the produce bin... BEWARE! 

8: When a recipe calls for beets, wash it really well, peel it and then double strain the juice before you add it to anything else (or drink it). If you plan on putting anything else through your juicer after the beet, then rinse the juice collection bin before you put anything else in it. Juiced beets are grainy and will make your juice have an almost sandy texture. 

9: Store pears, pineapple and  lemons in the refrigerator to prevent them from spoiling before you are ready to use them!