Green juice at home
If you want a quick and easy way to consume nutrients from a range of vegetables and fruits, green juice might be the answer. Though it might look like pond slime, green juice packs a significant nutritional punch — and it can even taste good!
Sick of paying high prices for store-bought green juice? It’s simple enough to make your own with the help of a juicer or blender. You might be wondering how to make green juice, so we’ll go through some of its common ingredients and methods for producing it.
How to make green juice taste good
The flavor of green juice depends on the ingredients you use. If you make juice out of nothing but kale and broccoli, it’s probably not going to be too palatable, but if you add some fruits for sweetness and a squeeze of lime, you’ll end up with something much tastier. It might take you a few tries to come up with a green juice recipe that tastes good, but it’s certainly possible.
Green juice vs. green smoothies
The difference between juice and smoothies is that juice is made by extracting the liquids from fruits and vegetables, leaving out fiber, while smoothies are made from whole, blended produce, fiber included. This makes green smoothies more filling than juices, and suitable as a meal replacement for breakfast or lunch, while green juices are simply a beverage to be drunk with a meal or between meals. Although fiber is good for you, some people find it difficult to digest too much fiber at once, particularly insoluble fiber, so juice might be the better option in this case. Some individuals also simply prefer the smoother, more liquidy texture of juice compared to smoothies, which are thick and can be somewhat lumpy.
What can you add to green juice?
The first step in making green juice is deciding what to put in it, and like its name, a good portion of green juice should consist of green vegetables. You can, however, add other ingredients to improve the flavor.
Leafy greens
Leafy green vegetables are an important part of a healthy diet. All have different levels of nutrients, but tend to contain decent levels of iron, calcium and potassium, along with a range of other vitamins and minerals. Kale is an excellent leafy green to add to your green juice; according to Healthline, it’s a great source of vitamins A, C and K, and is also rich in antioxidants. Other leafy greens you could add to your green juice include collards, spinach, cabbage, beet greens, watercress, arugula, swiss chard and romaine lettuce. Masticating juicers, such as the Omega Cold Press 365 Slow Masticating Juicer, are better at extracting juice from leafy greens than centrifugal juicers are.
Other green vegetables
You’ll get a better range of nutrients, and a higher yield of juice, if you add some other green vegetables to your juice, in addition to leafy greens. Brassicas, such as broccoli and kohlrabi, are highly nutritious choices. Also consider adding cucumber, zucchini and celery to your juice. You can choose to add some non-green vegetables, such as carrots or cauliflower, but you don’t want to add anything that will overpower the flavor or significantly alter the green color.
Herbs
Fresh herbs add a fragrant punch to your green juice, though we’d recommend sticking to one herb per recipe, so the flavors don’t get muddled. The fresh taste of mint works well with cucumber, spinach, lettuce and other lighter-flavored green vegetables. Cilantro is a good choice if you want a highly fragrant kick and is flavorful enough to meld with kale and other brassicas. Parsley is relatively mild but adds a delicious herbal taste to any green juice. Fresh herbs aren’t just for flavor, of course — they’re also nutrient-rich. As with leafy greens, you’ll get a better yield from a masticating juicer than a standard centrifugal juicer.
Fruits
Add some fruit to a green juice for a sweeter and more palatable taste than you’d get from vegetables alone. So as not to dilute the flavor of your green vegetables too much, we’d recommend adding just one primary type of fruit to your green juice. Apples, oranges, pineapple, melon or berries are great choices. In addition to your primary fruit, you may want to add the juice of a lemon or lime for a zesty flavor, especially if your green juice ends up tasting a little muddy.
Methods for making green juice
Once you’ve figured out what you want to add to your green juice, all that’s left to do is make it. You should use a juicer, if you have one, but if not, you can use a blender.
In a juicer
When making green juice in a juicer, start by washing your produce — use a mild fruit and vegetable wash, if you like — and peeling any fruits. Depending on the size of your produce and the chute of your juicer, you might need to chop some of the vegetables. Now, switch on your juicer and feed the produce into the chute. Be sure to place a jug or a glass in position below the chute to catch the juice as it comes out. Your juicer will automatically separate out the pulp, so your juice will be ready to drink right away.
In a blender
If you don’t have a juicer, it’s possible to make green juice with a blender, but you will need to add some water to help it process, so your juice will be slightly diluted. You’ll get the best results with a powerful blender. The Vitamix 5200 is an excellent choice if you have the budget, while the Ninja Professional Plus Blender is a decent enough alternative for a much lower price. Add your juice ingredients to the blender, along with one to two cups of water, and blend until smooth. Strain the fibrous pulp from the juice using cheesecloth or a fine mesh strainer.
Lauren Corona is a writer for BestReviews. BestReviews is a product review company with a singular mission: to help simplify your purchasing decisions and save you time and money
BestReviews spends thousands of hours researching, analyzing and testing products to recommend the best picks for most consumers. BestReviews and its newspaper partners may earn a commission if you purchase a product through one of our links.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
