Back in January, I was gifted with a juicer by a UK company that sells washing machines, among other things. Their "Fairy Hobmother" sent it as a gift for commenting on a friend's blog (who knew?). I unpacked it and started using it right away. The marketing genius behind what they did is a topic for a future post (on my other blog). Today, I want to talk about the juicer.
Apparently, there are different kinds of juicers. I had no idea. I first started lusting after one when my friend Judi hosted me at her delicious B&B in Atlanta last Fall. She had a "masticating" juicer. I thought it was pretty cool. But I had no idea there are actually three types of juicers: centrifugal, masticating, and triturating (twin gear). The more I learned about juicers, the more I recognized a parallel to life that I now share with my clients.
Centrifugal juicers are fast, relatively inexpensive, and easy to clean. It's the kind I have. There are dozens of tiny blade points spinning around on a metal mesh basket that shred up the pulp. Centrifugal force squeezes the juice through the mesh and tosses the pulp into a catch-all container. A bit of juice remains in the shredded fruits and veggies and sometimes I'll run them through twice to get about half again as much juice out of them. The juice can be a bit frothy, but it's quick and gets the job done.
Masticating juicers, like Judi's, behave in much the same way as our own teeth: grinding the pulp with a single gear that presses the pulp against a mesh screen and forces the pulp out using the drive mechanism and gravity, versus flinging it centrfugally. The resulting juice is more "juicy", as the pulp has been thoroughly squeezed, and less foamy, since the speed is a bit slower. It takes a little longer than my juicer, both to prepare and clean up, but you don't have to run the pulp through twice.
Finally, twin gear juicers run even slower, crushing the pulp between two gears and expelling the pulp from the juice. The result is a "healthier" juice, because cellular structures aren't damaged the way centrifugal juicers do. There's also less waste, which means more of the juice actually gets into your glass. It's cumbersome, a bit bulkier than the others, and more difficult to clean, but it's so powerful, it can also be used as a food mill (you could make peanut butter, I'm told), so it's a more versatile machine.