How long it takes to make your own fresh juice

A lot.

Unfortunately it is much easier to throw a bottle of juice to your trolley than to extract it yourself.

I'm irritated by some juicers commercials. Pretty lady or handsome gentleman lean over pristine table in fully fitted kitchen. In front of them they present the juicer and lying around are fresh fruit and vegetables. They are, of course, all washed, pealed, ready for processing. Presenter smiles and praises benefits and advantages of the machine. In the same time pushes some random ingredients into the drum to present its capabilities: soft fruits, hard vegetables, leafy greens. It can juice everything! Then he/she drinks it smiles and exhales: "delicious".

Camera cut. Vomiting.

To better illustrate this I recommend to watch Samson juicer presentation (this is exactly the same as my Matstone) on YouTube; or you can find more videos searching for "Samson juicer". It is just an example juicer and this scenario is used for all other juicers too.

We are slightly manipulated. Everything seems so easy, quick and effortless. But unfortunately it isn't, which I prove later. Here is a list of few details that "marketers" spare in their presentations.

First of all juicer needs to be prepared: you need to take it out from wherever it is stored, assemble, prepare containers for juice.

Then you need to wash fruits and vegetables, often you have to peel them or cut edible parts and remove inedible. It takes time and in my experience - most of the time.

Thirdly you need to clean up the mess. Juicer has to be washed properly not like they show: briefly under stream of cold water. Matstone parts cannot be washed in dishwasher. Sprinkling it with water will do if we want to buy another juicer in couple of months. Fruits have strong dyes (carrot) which needs to be removed with sponge and some washing up liquid. Sieve has to be brushed from remaining pulp using small brush (included). For those unlucky ones without servants the last thing left is to tidy up the kitchen so it can be used later.

I put to the test this ease and speed of use. I've selected a bowl of carrots, a bunch of grapes and my stopwatch. Here are my results:

• peeling the carrots - 11:45 (carrots were small so no need to cut them to pieces)
• washing the ingredients - 01:30
• preparation of grapes - 00:00 (nothing to peel here, I've separated grapes from stalk during extracting)
• fitting the juicer - 01:10 (putting on the table, connecting, taking necessary parts from cupboard, assembling)
• extracting carrots - 06:50 (produced 820 ml of juice)
• extracting grapes - 03:15 (produced 380 ml of juice)
• cleaning - 08:30 (disassembling and cleaning the juicer, washing up plastic parts, tidying up the kitchen)

In total I've spent 32:50 on this juice. It is not that brilliant as the commercials suggests. Peeling of vegetables took 35,8% of time, washing - 4,5%, preparing - 3,5%, cleaning up - 25,9%, extracting (the most exciting bit) only 30,7%! Less than a third. We can now see that thanks to clever techniques of video editing the juicing process is shortened by 70%. All the dull and time consuming parts are just excluded by the "kindness" of marketing people.

For this experiment I've coined few technical terms. Net time consumption - the time needed to extract 1 litre of juice from given fruit or vegetable. It takes into consideration only preparation and extraction of ingredients. Gross time consumption - time required to prepare 1 litre of juice including all the stages: preparation of juicer and all the cleaning.

I haven't extracted exactly one litre of every juice but it can be easily calculated by dividing juicing time by juice volume.

• Carrots net time consumption - 22:40 (minutes per litre)
• Grapes net time consumption - 08:33

We can see that it takes almost three times longer to prepare carrot juice than grape juice. I was only surprised by one thing. I thought that extraction from grapes will take much less time than from carrots. First is very soft small fruits and the latter is a hard vegetable that needs to be pushed hard using pusher. It turned out to be otherwise. I've calculated that only the extraction (no peeling, cutting, washing) of grape juice will took 08:33 and carrot juice - 08:20. Almost the same time with slight preference towards the carrot.

Time spend on activities not directly related to food processing is 09:40 (juicer assembling before and disassembling after, cleaning up machine and kitchen).

• Carrots gross time consumption 32:20 minutes per litre (09:40 + 22:40)
• Carrots gross time consumption 18:13 (09:40 + 08:33)

So if we want to make one litre of juice from one of this ingredients the difference is not that big when we include all the sages. To produce a litre of grape juice will be roughly a one third quicker than carrot juice. And all because preparation and cleaning takes the most of the time - 69,3%!

Thank you!