The Complete Idiot's Guide to Juicing - Ellen Brown [7]
Wanting to eat organic food is another reason to buy food in season rather than imported. While many European countries also have strict standards as to the meaning of “organic,” the same cannot be said for most Asian and Latin American countries—and they are the source of most crops that are out of season in the United States.
When using produce that is conventional rather than organic, always pay attention to the skin to see if it’s been treated with wax. This is especially true of cucumbers and citrus fruits. While citrus fruits need to be peeled before juicing, cucumbers do not. But if they are waxed, it is necessary to peel them.
The Least You Need to Know
• Juicing is an effective way of delivering nutrients to our bodies.
• Pulping uses the same ingredients as juicing but leaves in the fiber because pulped drinks are made in a blender.
• Juicers remove the juice from the pulp either by centrifugal force or through mastication.
• Organic produce is the best to use at all times because it’s not subjected to chemicals.
Chapter 2
Fruits for All Seasons
In This Chapter
• Fruits to juice
• Juice yields
• Tips for freezing fruit
Fruit and juice are synonymous to most people. If you only drink one glass of juice a day, chances are it’s a fruit juice in the morning. In this chapter, I’ll give you a guide to the fruits that I most often use in the recipes in this book. You’ll learn how to tell if fruits are ripe and ready for juicing and how to freeze ripe fruit for future treats.
You’ll also get some handy knowledge about how much juice you’ll get from various fruits. This is useful if you’re using juices for these recipes that someone else has squeezed.
Nature’s Energy
Fruits contain both complex carbohydrates and simple sugars. The complex carbohydrates are more slowly digested, which keeps your energy level up.
The simple sugars are in a form called fructose. In contrast to complex carbohydrates, fructose gives you instant energy when you drink the juice, but it also gives you nutrients you won’t get from the “empty calories” from refined sugar.
The Fruit Family
What unites fruit botanically as a group is that it has a seed or many seeds. That’s why tomatoes, eggplant, and avocadoes are technically fruits. But because we eat them as vegetables and with other vegetables, we’ll discuss them in Chapter 3.
The majority of this chapter gives you profiles of different fruits. At the end of the discussion of some fruits, I tell you how much juice you might expect to extract. So if you want to use a high-quality bottled juice, you’ll know the equivalents.
Apples. Although not as high in vitamins as some other fruits, apples do contain a high level of pectin, which helps reduce cholesterol. Yield: 8 ounces of juice per pound of apples.
Apricots. High in beta-carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A, pale ripe apricots are also a good source of fiber and potassium. A ripe apricot is soft when gently pressed, and the skin is thin enough that it does not have to be peeled. Just slice the apricot and discard the pit. Yield: 6 ounces of juice per pound of apricots.
Bananas. Bananas are an easy way to get a juice with a creamy texture without adding cream—or any binder for that matter. They are a fantastic source of potassium, an electrolyte lost during exercise, as well as an excellent source of magnesium and vitamin B6. Bananas are truly ripe when the peels are mottled with brown spots, not just bright yellow. Yield: 2 ounces of juice per pound of bananas.
Wrong Spin!
Bananas should not be pushed through your juicer. Because they don’t contain very much juice, you won’t have the luscious texture they bring to juices when they’re added in a blender.
Blackberries. Blackberries, rich, purple-black in color and high in heart-healthy compounds called saponins, are actually a cluster of tiny fruits, each with its