Juicing With The Rawtarian

Hi, I am Laura-Jane The Rawtarian from therawtarian.com where I specialize in simple, satisfying, raw food recipes. And if you’ve been with me for a while you know that I’m a huge smoothie, green smoothie person and I, since 2009 have been having hundreds and hundreds of green smoothies every morning but I only recently got into juicing and I do love juicing but it is not something that I do on a daily basis, mostly due to price and cost. Because I, when I juice I want to use organic produce and it can be very expensive, even for this generally inexpensive basic recipe that I’m gonna share with you today which is probably the juice that I have the most often, for a few reasons. Because I always have organic apples and carrots in the house and I love fresh ginger. But also, I can’t wrap my head around juicing a huge container of say, strawberries, fresh strawberries or something like that. For me, financially, that’s I can’t do it. I can’t put like this many grapes and make fresh grape juice, I just can’t do that. For me, I wanna enjoy the whole grape. So I do think juicing and um, you know, smoothies, they both have their place. And for me I probably do more, way more smoothies than I do juices. But that’s not to say that I don’t love juicing. And yeah, the way we treat it in our house is sometimes, it’s sort of a special thing so we might have it on a Saturday morning – we’ll make some juice together, or someone’s birthday or if I feel like I really need a pick-me-up or if I’m say, trying to fight off a cold or something – that hasn’t happened to me in a while, but that is kind of the scoop there. 

So what I thought I’d do in this video – I’m not gonna start making tons of like, “This is me juicing apples, this is me juicing carrots..." But I wanted to have one juicing video that introduces you to my juicer, which I really love and just to talk a little bit about juicing in general. I thought it would be a good chance to do that today. 

So of course, this is my Breville juicer. It’s relatively new on the market. And one of the things that I really like about it – oh my gosh, there’s some carrot residue on there but, you still love me, right? So one of the main things that I do love about this is that it has a really large chute, so actually it would take a whole apple, but I like to just cut them. So it has a really nice chute which is great. I also like that when it juices, the pulp comes into this container. It’s very, as far as juicers are concerned, reasonable easy to clean. You don’t have to get inside and like, doesn’t require any muscles to clean. But what I really like is I can use an old produce bag from, actually this is from some red peppers that I had, and I always line my pulp container with a bag so that I don’t even really need to clean this. 

And what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna juice what I have here, and then I’m gonna show you, I’m gonna take it a part a little bit and show you the different compartments and what’s involved in cleaning it. For me, I was a bit freaked out in obtaining a juicer coz I thought it would be too hard to clean. But let’s talk a little bit about what we’re gonna juice right now. So right now I have one small bag of organic carrots. Now I’ve washed them and I’ve cut the ends off, as you can see here, but I haven’t peeled them. Now for me, I really only juice organic produce, sometimes I eat non-organic produce but for juicing it seems like a smarter idea to me. And then with my apples, I have four organic apples that I’ve chopped in half. And I have not cored them or anything like that. This juicer’s really great at dealing with the problem areas of one’s piece of fresh fruit. And we also have some fresh ginger here. Of course, ginger root, it’s usually quite a bit longer when you get it at the grocery store but this is how it comes at the grocery store, of course. But I have just peeled off the perimeter, or the peel I should say, of the ginger. And I absolutely love ginger. And so for this, I wouldn’t even call it a recipe but what I tend to make for myself tends to be this: 4 apples, a small bag of carrots, and about that much ginger. So, you know, two thumbs of fresh ginger. And again, more about this juicer, so another thing that’s nice about it is you can set different settings for, if you have say, soft fruits like blueberries. Oh my gosh, I would never juice a whole bag of blueberries. It would taste delicious, but to me, it’s sort of sacrilegious to do that. But you can use different settings for different, um, hardness, basically that’s what it is. But I would say all of these vegetable or fruits and vegetables are about the same hardness. So I’m just going to set it to um, I’m going to turn it on, and there’s a setting for apples, and there’s no particular order, I’m just gonna say start with the apples, make sure I’m lined up. (inaudible) Press down slowly, to let all the juices come out. Smells good. So basically, juice coming out here, pulp coming out this way. Apple juice! I’d like to make a mixture. So apples are done, I’ll just do the ginger and some carrots. Hmmm. I’m really concentrating and doing this in reverse, but it’s about the same. Two more. 

So that was easy. So as you can see, the sort of ratio, we had a big nice bowl of carrots and apples and as I said, I don’t know if you could hear me while I was juicing, I don’t tend to make like apple juice, or orange juice on its own. I like to kinda just make a mixture, it tastes more interesting that way to me. So here we have our juice, I might as well show you that first. Let’s get rid of this. So, first things first, we have our juice, which, if you, especially are using ginger or something like that, I would definitely give it a little stir. Now this comes with the Breville juicer, this thing. As you can see it’s pretty foamy on the top, and I actually don’t mind the foam. But this, we’ll pour and it will keep the foam back, which is handy, I guess. But I like the foam as well. So it’s a beautiful orange color, and I know based on experience, it tastes phenomenal. It’s so good. (You knew it was going to be better) it truly is and for me, the addition of the ginger gives it a nice kick. It’s not really spicy, it shouldn’t be like overwhelmingly spicy but that ratio that I showed you is really nice. So that’s basically the juice, I don’ think there’s anything too much I want to say about that. Sometimes if I want it to taste a little greener, again to keep it cost effective, one of the things I like to add, to temper the sweet taste of everything is a little bit of a broccoli stump. Now I didn’t do that today but sometimes that’s a great way to reuse your broccoli stumps and a small stump goes a long way in terms of giving it a greener, sort of more green flavor. Or sometimes is actually nice, coz you don’t always want to have a lot of sweet taste. That was one thing I wanted to say and something else, about the flavor. Oh yeah, just a little tip, I love orange juice, I love apple juice, I love all kind of juices but for me, when I add orange, that’s orange juice is the one thing I like to do separately on its own. So I have a glass of orange juice. I always add a couple of oranges to this, it would really change the flavor, and actually for me I prefer it without orange. And you’ve heard me talk about green smoothies and salads and soups and given you this lesson. You know how the color wheel when you have all different colors, when you combine too many colors it becomes brown. It’s the same idea with flavors. Sometimes when you combine too many flavors, like if we’d done what we did before and then added broccoli and oranges and strawberries and cherries and all kinds of stuff, it kind of loses some of its flavor – the unique flavors – it just becomes kind of a big, bland, brown flavor. So I would encourage you to just experiment with a few different flavors like we have done today. 

But I did promise you I was gonna show you regarding the cleaning of it. So just to be safe, I don’t know, I don’t want to have my hands deformed on camera here. How I would go about doing this with my blender anyway, is that comes off and then the lid comes off and you want to shake it out coz there’s a lot of pulp. You’re gonna be amazed at how much pulp came out of just carrots and apples. And this is pretty easy to clean. All I do is, you know, you know just clean this and some of these pieces can go in the dishwasher as well. And then I just clean that off in the sink and I usually would go like this first, not because I really care about the pulp, it’s just the easiest way to clean up is to keep all the chunky pulp together. So I’ll be washing that. Don’t worry, I won’t do my dishes with you on film but I wanted to give you a sense of it coz when I was watching blender or juicer reviews, they didn’t really talk about the cleaning. Are you ready for the big pulp reveal? Here it is, it’s mostly carrot pulp, it’s quite a lot of pulp. But what I usually do is just throw that in the compost. I should make something out of it but I haven’t. Now, hear this you wanna be really careful. This, I don’t know if you could see that, we’re just gonna be popping this out and this is what’s really sharp in here. And so all you need to do is wash that. And again it’s one of those things you don’t want to let sit dirty all day, you just want to rinse it and wash it right away. And then this again, this you could definitely throw in the dishwasher. It’s spewing juice, but that’s basically it. And for me I actually don’t find it to be that bad. I juice and I wash right away and it doesn’t take long at all, comparatively, but I do find smoothies to be easier because all you have to wash is basically like the jug and the lid. So there’s more washing involved, it’s more expensive than smoothies. Of course, you are losing your fiber because this has tons of fiber in it which you’re not getting. But this has, you know, a lot of condensed nutrients in it as well. So there’s pros and cons and both are awesome but that’s a little bit about my juicing story and my juicer and I hope that’s been helpful for you. And I’m the Rawtarian from therawtarian.com and I thank you so much for being here with me today.