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!

Why make your own juice?

Exactly why? It is much more convenient just to buy juice in a bottle or a box.

Disadvantages
Supporters of supermarket juice* reading this will shout in perfect harmony: when buying juice you

• save time required for preparation,
• save money because juice produced on industrial scale, in big factory using latest food manufacturing techniques is cheaper,
• have a vast choice of flavours, even fruits we've never seen or heard about,
• can show off in front of other people with our top brand bottle/box of juice
• provide employment for people working in fruit processing business

Advantages
But my answer is, that when making juice at home you:

• spend nice time shopping for fruits, selecting the best examples, pealing and juicing them,
• know what ingredients were used for juice because you've just dragged them from shops,
• preserve all nutrients from fruit or vegetables; drinking juice after extraction we supply all vitamins and minerals contained in ingredients,
• respect environment by not using unnecessary packaging, also peelings can be composted or in worst case scenario they break down quickly on land fill,
• and most importantly: enjoy taste, texture and quality that no supermarket juice can provide.

Sad truth
Lets be frank. Juice producers have only one goal: profit. That is why they will do everything to lower the cost and increase profit margin. Whether juice is healthy or nutritious doesn't matter. If they put some letters on the label symbolizing vitamins and this will boost sale - that is the way to go. They may use 1% concentrated juice and call it "fruit drink" to deceive customer. I think what works the best is a special offer like "50% off" or "buy 1 get 1 free". People jump into such "deals" and don't bother to read ingredients list.

Besides juice inside box or bottle has almost no nutritional value because it was lost during manufacturing process. All the colours, flavours and vitamins are usually added later. Sometimes those juices have even negative impact on our health because of amounts of sugar in them. In most cases its just overpriced water with chemicals.

Supermarket juice* in my understanding is a fluid sold in shops which was a fresh fruit very long time ago (weeks or months). Then it was harvested, squeezed, evaporated to produce concentrate, pasteurised and frozen. After travelling half of the world someone added back water, vitamins, flavour, sugar (or sweetener) and wrapped in nice looking packaging. Please prove me wrong and show that this is healthy.

So better start juicing if you care about your health!

Matstone - best masticating juicer?

On the picture above you can see my juicer. But it's not an ordinary one but Matstone Multi-purpose 6 in 1 juicer.

It doesn't look like typical juicer we're probably used to. Reminds rather meat mincing machine. It is a masticating juicer. In a traditional juicer our fruits and vegetables are finely grated and juice is extracted thanks to centrifugal force that presses pulp against the sieve. But Matstone masticating juicer uses single auger to gentle crush the fruit and then push it through sieve with decreasing diameter. Juice floats through a bottom hole and pulp is pushed in front. Juicer is equipped with 1 horse power motor and rotates at low speed of 80 RPM. This reduces friction and heat so helping give a high quality juice. It can extract juice from virtually anything: carrots, beetroot, celery, apples, oranges and leafy greens: wheat grass, spinach, cabbage and other.

Why did I decid to buy this machine? Because it produces better juice thanks to low rotation. This method prevents from two most destructive event that occur during extraction by high-speed, centrifugal juicer.

First of all low rotation doesn't cause juice to heat and won't destroy most valuable nutrients that are sensitive to temperature. Juice extracted using this method is healthier and retain much more active vitamins and enzymes. Secondly, masticating juicer doesn't mix juice with air, which slows down oxygenation process that degrades nutrients. This is why apple juice goes brown quickly. Juice stays fresh for longer and preserves its health benefits.

Also masticating juicers extract more juice than their centrifugal counterparts. I'm not sure whether it is a scientific fact or just marketing. I'll try to put this to the test and publish my results on this blog. I'll measure yield of my juicer for various fruits and vegetables. If ever I get my hands on other centrifugal juicer I'll try to do the same and compare results.

Matstone juicer is a multi-purpose juicing machine. This is another advantage. Except juicing it can also:

• grind nuts, seeds, pepper, coffee and even crushes ice;
• homogenize using additional (included) sieve; it can be used to produce mouses, ice-cream, baby food or even peanut butter, marzipan, pesto or guacamole;
  
• make pasta and bread fingers using 5 different shapes;
• it can even extract oil (but this attachment is not included).

We're only limited by our imagination. It is very useful in my kitchen and I'm using it all the time. It has only one drawback: it is big, takes quite a bit of space and weights 7 kg (15 pounds).

Interested? Check it on Amazon, where I bought mine!

It's all about fruit and vegetable juices

What is this blog about? Juices. But not about any juices but freshly squeezed at your home and consumed within minutes. I'd like to focus on couple of areas:

• Yield or how many juice can be extracted from various fruits and vegetables
• Nutritional value of fruits and vegetables
• Interesting facts about healthy eating in general
• Something about juicers
• And many more ...

Images in posts in most cases will be done by myself. For sure they won't be that pretty like in catalogue. But this is not about them being perfect. I like my juice home made so pictures can be "home made" too. Fruits I use aren't beautiful either but this doesn't matter because they end up as a delicious, fresh, nutritious juice.

I'm what I eat and drink. I'm juicemaniac. I wanted to title my blog like that but the sub-domain was already taken :( But my polish blog (and my nick) means exactly that: Sokomaniak = soko (juice) + maniak (maniac)

I would appreciate any comments. If you have any ideas, suggestions please feel free to write them here. I'll try to address all of them.

Enjoy!

Welcome!

Hello all!

What can I write in blog's first post? Probably nobody will read it in the near future?

This is my second blog on Blogger. Basically this will be a clone of my first blog sokomaniak.blogspot.com which is in Polish. I'll be posting the same content here but in English, so wider audience can enjoy it. Hopefully.

Soon there will be another post that will reveal the dark secret: what is this blog about? Or if you know Polish you will figure that out reading original blog.

Why I'm doing this instead using Google Translate? First, translations are very poor. Secondly, English speaker will not find my Polish blog in his searches. Lastly, there is about 510 million people who speak English compared with 38 million Poles


I appreciate all comments, ideas and suggestions.

Enjoy!