Everything you need to know before you start juicing your way to better health.

While we’ve been enjoying juice since the early days, juicing has become trendy once again in the recent years. Thanks to the health movement that’s encouraging everyone to ditch heavily processed and prepackaged food and eat more natural food items instead, juicing is now one of the most popular ways to add some fruits and veggies to your diet.

A lot of people actually enjoy juicing as it lets you eat healthy without having to sacrifice your sweet tooth. With a good recipe that combines various sweet fruits and veggies, you won’t even feel like you’re consuming a drink that’s loaded with vitamins and minerals. It won’t make you feel like you’re depriving yourself of the good stuff and will effectively satiate your hankering for sweets. And since you don’t feel bad about missing out on all the junk food you could have been eating, you won’t be tempted to binge on unhealthy food every time you have the chance.

If you’re planning on getting a good load of fresh juice on your system, though, it’s best to learn how you can get yourself one of the best juicers in the market today. These kitchen appliances will help you enjoy juicing more as it can make the task of whipping up a fresh glass of juice a lot easier. However, with the several options you have, finding the best brand or model for a juicer can be a challenge.

How do you get started, though? To make your search a lot simpler, it’s best to try to get to know more about this appliance first. The basics will help you understand how it works and which one could be the best option for your household. Below, you can find a comprehensive guide about juicers and what they do, so make sure to read through this article to learn more about this kitchen equipment.

Types of Juicers

First of all, juicers come in various shapes and sizes. They may also have different methods of extracting the juice out of your fresh produce. Some are more efficient than others, so you need to get to know your options better. Taking note of what performs best is essential if you want to make the most out of your purchases.

To get you started on your search, here are the different types of juicers:

1. Centrifugal Juicers

As the name suggests, centrifugal juicers make use of centrifugal force to extract the juice from your fresh produce. They work a lot like blenders as they have razor-sharp blades to shred the fruits and vegetables to a pulp.

The pulp will then be spun at high speed to release the juice, which will then be transferred to your drink container of choice through a spigot. As this kind of juicer relies on fast spinning to get the job done, centrifugal juicers are Also known as high-speed juicers. They can effectively handle soft and hard foods. Unfortunately, they’re not so effective with leafy greens. As these vegetables are quite delicate, the use of centrifugal force will prove to be too much for them. If you try juicing lettuce, spinach, and other leafy greens with this kind of juicer, you’ll only end up with some shredded leaves and a clogged strainer.

Most centrifugal juicers are also referred to as ejection juicers or ejection wide feed chute juicers. Ejection juicers are sub types of juicers that make it easy for many to juice large amounts of fruits and veggies as they don’t keep the pulp inside the unit. They immediately release pulp as you go, so you don’t have to stop juicing just to clear the pulp chamber every so often.

A major selling point of this type of juicer is that they’re easily available, being the older design for juicers. They’re also more affordable than the other types. However, centrifugal juicers also have some disadvantages to its design. The review includes general advantages and disadvantages of these types of juicers. I then also give the pros and cons of each of the 5 reviewed best juicers in that category.

For one, its blades can be hard to clean. Then, there’s also the fact that their high-speed spinning can heat the juice and add oxygen to the mix, which significantly shortens the juice’s shelf life.

2. Masticating Juicer

Masticating juicers may not have the most appetizing moniker, but this type has rave reviews that will definitely make you closely consider getting one. This juicer type actually got its name from the process it uses to extract juice from fresh produce.

A masticating juicer works by crushing and squeezing the juice out of your fresh produce. It makes use of a single gear (or auger) and blade and is designed to mimic a person’s chewing to extract the juice from the ingredients. This allows effective juice extraction, giving you more juice.

Ideal for soft and hard produce, it’s also perfect for working with leafy greens. These appliances can help you transform your salad greens into juice in no time. Some can even juice wheatgrass, while others can double duty as food processors as well. Click here to read my review of the 5 best masticating juicers on the market today.

Also known as slow or cold press juicers, masticating juicers may not use high speed to extract juice, but it’s not slow in the literal sense of the word. This only means that it uses a slow method to get the juice out in contrast to the fast spinning that centrifugal juicers use.

Masticating juicers are also available in a few more sub-types that we can easily classify into two: horizontal and vertical masticating juicers. They are differentiated depending on the internal design of the appliance as most units have horizontal or vertical chambers. You’ll also find single auger horizontal/vertical juicers as well as dual-stage auger juicers in the market today, but they’re just fancier ways to denote and specify the construction of your appliance.

With its many advantages, masticating juicers are some of the most popular options as of late. In fact, if you ask for an expert’s opinion, they’d most likely tell you to invest in one rather than save some cash on a centrifugal juicer. This type will let you enjoy more yield and better tasting fresh juice, making them worth the money despite their hefty price tags.

3. Twin-Gear Juicers

Also known as a triturating juicer, twin-gear juicers are easily confused with masticating juicers since both make use of great force in extracting juice from fresh produce. As the name suggests, this kitchen appliance will rub, crush, grind or pound fresh juice and veggies into fine particles to effectively release the juice inside.

Unlike masticating juicers and as the name suggests again, it uses two gears that rotate inward, trapping the ingredients in between a teeny tiny gap that only measures 0.1 mm to grind, crush, and easily extract a fruit or vegetable’s juice content.

What makes twin-gear juicers  on of the best juicers and an excellent candidate as your kitchen’s newest addition is the fact that its extraction method also allows effective release of the fresh produce’s enzymes and nutrients. You also don’t have to worry about oxidation with this type of juicer.

Like the masticating juicers, though, twin-gear juicers make use of low speed and great forces to extract juice from your fresh produce. It only works at 80 to 160 RPM, allowing it to be delicate enough to your ingredients that it doesn’t disrupt the cellular structure of fruits and veggies. This allows you to enjoy more nutrients and vitamins with its output.

Best used for soft fruits and veggies as well as leafy greens, it promises to help you make the tastiest and healthiest drinks. However, you should take good care of the unit when using it to juice hard ingredients due to the small gap between the gears. This doesn’t mean you can’t use it for ingredients like carrots and apples, though. You’ll just need to chop them thinner and smaller than usual.

4.Other Types of Juicers

Aside from these three, here are a few more kitchen equipment that are designed to help you extract juice from fresh produce:

Manual Press Juicers are the traditional juicers most of us have at home. They come in various shapes and sizes but mostly require physical strength to squeeze out the juice from various fruits. They’re often used to juice oranges, lemons, limes, and wheatgrass.

Functional Juicers are basically manual press juicers that are designed to extract juice from a specific type of fruit or vegetable. The best example for this are wheatgrass and citrus juicers.

Hydraulic Juice Presses are the bulky traditional juicers used for decades before today’s juicers have become easily available. These are popular for their great efficiency and with the right materials and construction, durability. A lot of commercial establishments still prefer using hydraulic juice presses as they can withstand heavy use and are more cost-efficient than their electric counterparts. Their classic design makes many consider these as the best juicers until today.

When Best to Use Each Type of Juicer

Now that you know the different kinds of juicers, the next thing that you’ll need to know is which one is best for what kind of usage. As they are designed differently, each has their own unique strengths that you have to consider when choosing the right one for your needs and requirements. To help you out, here’s a quick guide on the best uses for each juicer.

Factors to Consider if you Want to Buy the Best Juicers

After learning how to tell different kinds of juicers apart, the next thing you need to do is to learn what you should keep in mind in choosing the best juicers for you. These factors will help you narrow down your options and determine which product will best suit your needs:

1. Ease of Cleaning: Clean up is one of the biggest hassles of using kitchen appliances. And since juicers use blades and other materials to extract juice from the produce, some can be difficult to clean. Skip the ones that will take too much time and effort to clean as most of them won’t encourage you to make the most out of your purchased unit.
2. Noise Level: Most people love having a glass or two of fresh juice in the morning. If you get a noisy juicer, having calm and peaceful mornings will be impossible. You also wouldn’t want to wake up everyone in your household with a loud racket upon waking up, so looking for quiet units is important.
3. Speed of Juicing: Most electric juicers take a small amount of time to get the job done, but some are still faster than others. As a rule, centrifugal juicers have the fastest RPMs as they make use of the speed to extract juice. Masticating juicers are a bit slower because they have to be gentle with softer ingredients. This doesn’t mean that they’ll take a lot of time to work with, though.
4. Length of Warranty: The longer the length of warranty a juicer has, the better the odds you’ll have at its durability. Make sure to check the fine print, though, as some don’t really cover much even if they offer a long-term warranty.
5. Types of Produce you will be Juicing: Do you prefer fruits over vegetables? If you think you’ll only want to juice a certain kind of produce most of the time, get something that will work great with your ingredient of choice. You might even find manual citrus juicers the best juicers for you in some cases.
6. Quality of the Juice: Different juicing methods also affect the quality of juice produced by various kinds of juicers. This is why, if you want to get the most out of the produce in terms of vitamins and nutrients, you should go for a masticating or twin-gear juicers. These two promise to retain all the good things in fresh produce, letting you get as much as you can in your system upon immediate consumption.

Tips for Getting the Best Out of your Juicer

Finding the best juicers for your needs and buying the right one is just the first step in juicing for your health. You also have to know how to properly use your unit to really make this lifestyle change work for you. To do that, these few tips might come in handy:

1. Know what your juicer is good at.

Again, different kinds of juicers have various strengths and weaknesses. Knowing what your unit is good and bad at will help you better understand how it works. If it’s great with hard ingredients, then use it for such. If it has adjustable speed settings, then make sure to use slower juicing speeds for softer ingredients. You should know these little things so you can always get the best results from your juicer.

2. Don’t just juice random ingredients.

While most fruits and vegetables can be used for juicing, you shouldn’t just mix and match ingredients on a whim. Sometimes they won’t taste nice when combined with other produce, so be careful in what to blend together. Luckily, there are loads of juicing recipes that you can find online so you shouldn’t have a hard time learning how to make a healthy and fresh drink.

3. Learn how to use your juicer for higher yield.

There are a few tricks how you can actually get more yield out of your ingredients no matter what kind of juicer you might have. Some of these include:

4. Always clean your juicer right after every use.

A lot of fresh fruits and vegetables and stain and stick to your juicer’s chambers, so make sure never to let the ingredients sit still for more than a few minutes inside your juicer. Even if you have the best juicers, doing so can affect your appliance’s integrity and may affect the taste of the output and performance of the unit. It’s best to always clean the unit every after use to always keep it in good shape.

Common Juicer Brands/Manufacturers

Lastly, the best juicers come from great brands and manufacturers. While the brand should never be the only factor you should look at when deciding which unit to get, it can still be a good selling point as most manufacturers are known for their quality products and great customer service. Having a few brands in mind can also help narrow down your search, so you should also know what names to look for when searching for the right juicing appliance.

So, what brands should you go after? Some of the most popular names in this area include Breville, Hurom, Omega, Bella, Cuisinart, Hamilton Beach, and Black + Decker.

Keep in mind, though, not every product from these brands will be worth your while. You’ll still need to give each unit a close look if you want to get the most out of your time and money. Don’t worry too much about the overwhelming amount of options, though. With the help of my best juicers reviews above, you’re sure to find a great unit that will do everything you need and more to kick start a healthy juicing lifestyle.