How to Select a Juicer

I get so many questions about my juicer, from what kind it is, why I use it over my Greenstar and what is the best juicer. The problem is there is no perfect one size fits all juicer. You have to decide what you want in a juicer. I have owned several juicers over the years, from all of the categories below. I still own two: my Omega Vert 330 and my Greenstar. However, my Greenstar is in the garage. We have wonderful memories together-most of them at the kitchen sink. I am going to make learning about juicers and picking one as simple as possible for you. As long as you can speak the lingo you’ll be able to pick what you want. First you must familiarize yourself with the extraction methods. I have given you an example of each in green. There are many types of centrifugal and auger juicers other than the ones I listed in green. Those are only examples. After the description I have rated them on five aspects In red:

• Price

• Speed of Juicing

• Ease of Cleaning

• Amount of Nutrients

• Noise Level

Extraction Methods-this is simple, don’t complicate it for yourself:

• Centrifugal (Juiceman, Breville):  centrifugal juicers contain a round shredder disc with sharp blades that spin at high-speed while grinding and grating the fruits and vegetables into small pieces. Cheap-Low Priced, Fast, Hard to clean, Fewer Nutrients, Loud

• Masticating (Champion): this juicer first grates, then masticates or chews the pulp and further breaks down the cell-wall structure, then it mechanically presses or squeezes the pulp to extract the juice from it. Moderate-High Priced, Moderate Speed, Hard to clean, High Nutrients, Moderate noise

• Dual Stage Single Auger Juicers (Omega Vert):  the juice is first extracted through a crushing stage then squeezed during a second pressing stage through a screen. This produces more high nutrient juice, and very dry pulp. Works well on all types of produce even leafy greens. Low-Mid Range Priced, Moderate-Fast Speed, Easy to clean, High Nutrients, Moderate noise

• Twin-gear, Triturating (Greenstar):  A twin-gear juicer runs at even lower speed than masticating machines and generate less heat than other kinds of juicing machines which translates into more nutrients. During the first step the twin-gear juicer crushes the vegetables and fruits pulverizing them into a pulp, it then extracts the juice in the second step.  Moderate-High priced, Slow, Hard to clean, Maximum Nutrients, Moderate noise

I am not going to cover the Norwalk juicer with a $2000 price tag or any wheatgrass juicers. If you are in the market for either of those there is plenty of information out there. This is to guide you to get a good in home affordable juicer for daily use.

I use an Omega Vert 330. My reasons are up there in red. The red are my general opinions of each type of juicer. Not all of the juicers will fit those generalizations but many of them do. I would actually rate my Omega Vert fairly quiet and my Greenstar Loud. I honestly could have cared less about the price, obviously since I bought a Greenstar. I wanted the best quality juice since I was putting expensive organic produce into it. Once I had the Greenstar I found that it was very slow to juice and the cleanup was a pain. The Omega may not have as high of quality of juice (debatable) BUT it is faster and much easier to clean. This makes it possible to juice more often for me. I wouldn’t opt for a  centrifugal personally because the nutrients in the juice are compromised and they were hardest of all of my juicers to clean. I feel that the Champion is time-consuming and difficult to clean like the Greenstar.

There is so much information out there about juicers that can have your head spinning. Remember this is all my opinion. Dual stage single auger uprights are my favorite and there are probably other brands in this catagory that rock like the Omega. I’ve just done my best to save you from buying a juicer from every category like I have. I hope this has simplified it all for you. Feel free to post questions below.

Oh and before you ask-my two favorite juicing books are: The Juicing Bible and Complete Book of Juicing.

This entry was posted on March 2, 2012 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Eating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.