and Preparing Your Produce for Juicing
Produce Selection and Seasonality
As you get into the habit of juicing you will learn more and more about the nature of the produce you juice. You will learn that in different seasons and from different sources, produce tastes differently! Sometimes a certain vegetable will be incredibly sweet, sometimes more hot and pungent. Just as any experienced vegetable gardener knows, different temperatures, moisture and weather conditions directly affect the taste of the produce you grow. This does not change simply because you are buying your produce in the local shop or grocery store. A large part of produce selection is variable and has to do with seasons, climate and growing conditions.
For most of us, selecting produce at the grocery store seems a fairly predictable and mundane task, but that is simply because we are disconnected from the immediacy of the growing phenomenon. Selecting the best produce for juicing is highly dependent on season. Getting to learn the natural seasons of your produce will give you a big advantage when it comes to selecting the best juicing materials as you move through the seasons.
One of the most important and simple rules of juicing is to taste the produce you are juicing as you go! In our household we jokingly say “That’s eating the juicing material, isn’t it?!”, and the answer is always YES. Because if you do not taste it as it goes into the juicer you do not know what it will taste like coming OUT of the juicer. The answer is, it will always taste even more powerfully of whatever it tastes like going in. So a ‘hot’ cabbage or a sweet Kale will taste hot or sweet in the juice. Some seasons, kale is so sweet it is like candy, others it is so bitter it is like coffee. Knowing how it tastes going in helps you balance the juice so that it is delicious and palatable coming out of the juicer and into your glass.
There will be juices where you will look at your mate or friend or juicing partner and say “WOW that is AMAZING!” and there will be juices where you take one sip and say “Where is the apple/orange/lemon/yam/beet (fill in the blank) to make this juice drinkable!?!”
So, rule number one when preparing your juices, is to TASTE the produce you are juicing. A little nibble is all it takes to know – bitter? sweet? pleasant? super-astringent? Makes your hair stand up on end? It is completely worth the tiny effort it takes to nibble as you juice and it will pay you back in spades. Every once in a while you will nibble and say “YECH! P.U., ACK!” and because you will be in the midst of making a delicious juice, you will refrain from adding that YECH to your juice before it is too late and you have spoiled a perfectly lovely juice.
This is the reality of juicing. You cannot ‘taste test’ every piece of produce you buy, so you learn to taste test as you juice. It is so worth it. It will also teach you a valuable long term vocabulary of tastes in the produce world that will serve you well as you go on to develop your juicing regimen over the long term. No one says you have to juice any particular vegetable or fruit to be a successful juicer and if you determine that something doesn’t work for you then you can simply eliminate it early on and not have to worry about it.
That being said, the other thing you will discover over time is that your taste will change when it comes to juices and juicing. So every once in a while, go ahead and go back and experiment with that thing you decided was never going to be in your juice again – you may just surprise yourself.
Rule number two for selecting produce is to go organic when at all possible. This is particularly important for the produce on the infamous ‘dirty dozen’ list of most highly toxic from pesticides, which include quite a few of the most popularly juiced fruits and vegetables. Those familiar with produce will most likely know these, but just in case there is any question in your mind, here they are again:
These items have been tested and rated for pesticide residue by the Environmental Working Group as of the 2010 harvest (testing completed in 2011) and are the produce items most heavily loaded with pesticide residue. The last thing you need to be doing when you juice is adding pesticide residue to your diet. So, if you cannot buy these products as organic, the best idea is to skip them altogether, or grow your own.
The importance of this list is twofold. First, you need to know where you are most likely to encounter high levels of toxic chemicals in your food. Second, you need to know which foods are particularly excellent juicing candidates and so highly nutritious that they should be in your juicing regimen. In the list above, the items that jump out as important members of that list are apples, celery, blueberries, kale and collard greens. These are all excellent cleansing foods (isn’t that ironic?) and eliminating them from your juicing regimen would be a serious loss. One way to solve this problem is to look for them at local farmers markets and be sure to ask the sellers if they do not specifically state that their produce is organic. Another solution is to frequent local grocers who carry a larger selection of organic produce. Here in the Pacific Northwest that means local smaller grocery chains such as Market of Choice, or even the regional chain, Fred Meyer where there is a much higher assortment of both local and organic produce than in many of the nationwide chain stores.
So don’t give up too soon if you don’t find the organic produce you want for juicing right away. You can often find it, and it does not have to be super expensive either. See the chapter on planning your juicing budget for more tips on best shopping practices for your produce for juicing.
There are also what is known as the ‘Clean 15′ which are the produce items with the LOWEST measured pesticide residue for the same period. I’m not sure why the newer 2011 harvest data results don’t seem to be showing up anywhere yet, but perhaps they are so similar, the folks at the Environmental Working Group didn’t think they needed to re-do the list.
Here is their 2011 Clean 15 list:
Unfortunately, not all of these are great for juicing – but a lot of them are. The cantaloupe and kiwi, and of course cabbage; and adding a grapefruit to your citrus mix can jazz things up nicely as well. Sweet potatoes (aka yams), mango, asparagus and pineapple are all perfectly good juicing candidates.
Specific Instructions for Preparing Your Produce for Juicing
We know, it’s true, the manual for the Omega juicer says to chop everything into small pieces in order to extract the maximum amount of juice; but, honestly, it is not necessary and it takes way too much time. Refer to our newbie juicer mistakes chapter here.
There are some things you can do to make juicing quick and easy and to get the most out of your juicing produce and chopping them all into small pieces is not one of them.
So here are the steps to take to prepare your produce for juicing, in alphabetical order to keep it simple and easy:
Apples: Wash, core and juice. Do not juice the core. Do not peel. Larger apples will need to be cut across the cored sections to make them narrow enough to fit into the juicing chute.
Beets: Scrub well with a vegetable brush. Cut off root tail and cut greens just below the leaf. Cut lengthwise into pieces slender enough to fit into the chute. Juice greens separately from the beets using celery, carrots or other firm vegetables to help feed them through the juicer. Or keep the leaves aside for salads, soups and stews.
Bananas:
