As expected, my kids wanted to try lots of fruit only combinations, so I allowed them 2 days of mixing their choice of fruits to see what they could come up with.
As the sticky note says on the photo below, this glass was made from one orange (peeled and seeded), one lemon (peeled and seeded), one Bosc pear (seeded) and 1/4 cup red grapes. It produced about 14 ounces of juice which the kids thought was good but still a tad sour. I did not let them sweeten any of the juices with anything other than fresh fruits.
This next one was 3 small granny smith apples, seeded and a 1/2 cup frozen cranberries (NOT sweetened).
As expected, this did not produce a lot of juice, about 6 ounces, and was very sour due to the whole cranberries and these apples were sour to begin with.
This juice also separated quite a bit, which upset my daughter! Oh well, that’s what experiments are for.
My final juicing experiment was with a sweet potato and apples. I was truly surprised how much juice came out of one small-medium sweet potato. It was okay tasting, however it remained somewhat chalky in feel. I much prefer the taste of a baked sweet potato, warm and soft and naturally sweet!
So, our conclusion for our particular family……we will continue to eat our fruits and vegetables fresh and cooked and occasionally throw frozen fruits into the blender; but the time, cleaning and food waste associated with a juicer is not for us at this time. This is only my personal opinion. I do love the taste of fresh squeezed juice over commercially prepared juices, and I do recommend the juicing of fresh fruits and vegetables to certain clients with particular nutritional challenges.
I hope our little home experiment gave you some insight into the use of juicers and blenders if you are trying to add more fruits and vegetables to your diet and were wondering what might work for you.
Feel free to continue to share your success or failures with juicing or smoothies and please post recipes that you would recommend.
