Buying Advice

Owning a juicer or citrus press is a simple and cheap way to make yourself fresh juice drinks from fruit or vegetables, and offers you the opportunity to mix and match juice types. There are two main types of juicers:

Juice extractors: these will extract juice from most types of fruit and vegetable by pulping what you put in and then separating the juice from the pulp.

Citrus presses: this type of product will press the juice out of citrus fruits (limes, lemons, oranges, grapefruits etc.) – they have lower power than juice extractors because they don’t have to chop the fruit up.

There are also some integrated juice extractors and citrus presses available. To help you make the right choice for you, check out the following guide to some of the important features that you might want to consider:

Wattage

This is the power (in Watts) with which a juicer can work – the larger the number of Watts the more power, so the harder the machine can work.

Action

Juicers usually work by you chopping up whatever you would like to juice (except citrus presses where you cut a fruit in half and it is pressed) and putting it into the machine, where it is chopped up before being pressed, filtered or spun in a centrifuge. Most filters are stainless steel – look out for ones with adjustable pulp control, which will allow you to choose how much pulp you would like in juice. Centrifugal action is better than plain filtering, as it uses spinning to get all the juice out.

Compartments

Juicers can have either separate pulp and juice compartments, or there can be just a pulp compartment and you put a container under a spout to collect juice. The latter option can be advantageous in that it gives an unlimited juice capacity and also makes less washing up. When looking at capacities, a guide as to how much in terms of fruit a juicer will hold is that 400ml of pulp = 1kg of apples and a litre of juice = 10-14 oranges.

Speeds

Juicers with more than one speed can accommodate better for both soft (eg. grapes) and hard (eg. carrots) foods by having a speed specialised for both types.

Hoppers

A hopper is a tube like structure, which leads into the pulping part of the juicer, ie. what you put food down. It’s worth looking at the size of the hopper, as some are very small (so you will have to chop up what is being juiced and some are large enough to just put whole fruits down. Invertable hoppers can mean that you can keep adding food whilst the juicer is still working.

Safety

Make sure that the juicer you are buying has an interlocking lid, and check for other features such as non-slip feet and cord storage.

Noise Level

If you are sensitive to noise and will be juicing hard fruit or vegetables check out the noise level before making your purchase.