Maybe you’ve got a favorite juice bar where you grab the latest delicious juice with wheatgrass, kale, strawberries and something you can’t quite identify. But what if you’re ready to save some money and have a new adventure in making your own homemade juices for weight loss and the other health benefits you love?
- Where do you start?
- What ingredients do you use?
- What equipment do you need?
Our Expert Tips on How to Start Juicing at Home
Juicing isn’t hard. In fact, it’s one of the easiest things you can do to improve your health and have some delicious, easy-to-make meals at home.
We’ve rounded up our best advice to offer for juicing for beginners ranging from equipment needs to types of recipes you should try. We’re including an easy recipe at the bottom that you can use for your first homemade juice.
Let’s get started.
1. Use a Blender for Your Juicing Diet Plan
A lot of times, people think they can only juice if they have a fancy juicer that’s going to cost them next month’s paycheck. Now, while we love quality juicers, one of the best tips for juicing at home is that you should start out using a blender.
Blenders are much more affordable, so they’re a good way to test the waters. We hope you’ll love juicing so much that you go out and buy a juicer next month, but you may decide you don’t have enough time to spend juicing every day. In that situation, buying a juicer would have been a big waste of money for you.
Plus, juicing with a blender keeps more of the fiber of the fruits and vegetables in your juicing recipes.
2. Start with Simple Recipes
One of the biggest tips we can offer is that you should start out with simple juice recipes. You’re capable of making anything – you know how to chop fruits and toss them into a juicer – but starting off with recipes that only use three or four ingredients cuts down on preparation times and helps you focus on the process instead of the recipe.
3. Find Recipes with Easy-to-Acquire Ingredients
We have some amazing recipes that involve aloe vera, prickly pear fruit and a variety of other exotic fruits and vegetables. They’re worth trying at some point, but when you’re first starting out, it’s best to go with simple, easy-to-find ingredients like apples, cucumbers, spinach, and kale. These items can be purchased from just about any grocery store, which means less stress.
4. Start with Organic Ingredients Only
A lot of times, people think that organic isn’t really that important. However, non-organic produce can be loaded with pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizer residue, and GMOs.
So, as you get started with juicing, go with organic to avoid losing the benefits of juicing for health. You’ll spend a little more money in the front-end, but the pay-off – a longer, healthier life – is worth it.
The best places to find organic produce are going to be in well-respected stores that believe in fair trade and healthy living, like farmer’s markets – though you always need to verify the items are certified organic. Local grocery stores are also a great source of high-quality, locally grown organic produce.
5. Re-Introduce the Pulp into Your Recipes
Once you’ve started using a juicer, the fiber content of your juicing recipes will go down significantly. This means that you’re missing out on some of the health benefits of the ingredients you’re using.
Our best juicing tips for this: You can take some of the pulp extracted by the juicer and stir it into your juice. Or, better yet, blend your juice and keep the fiber.
6. Purchase Your Produce Fresh Every Few Days
Another one of our most important juicing tips is this: buy your produce fresh every other day or so.
It may seem a little excessive – we know you’re busy – but getting the fresh produce regularly helps reduce food spoilage. Plus, the fresher your ingredients, the more delicious your recipes. Win-win.
Plan your juicing diet plan on Sunday, mapping out each ingredient you’ll need for each recipe, and divide the list into days for your grocery trips.
7. Never Keep Juice Longer than an Hour
This might seem excessive, but this is one of the most important parts of juicing. When juice is left for too long after extraction, bacteria grows. This bacteria can cause a variety of food-borne illnesses that can lead to some serious health risks.
The reason you’re at risk?
Your homemade juice, though awesome, isn’t pasteurized. That means you’re vulnerable.
If you’re not into room temperature juices, you can solve this problem by blending in some ice. You can also chill the ingredients before juicing to help avoid needing to drink room temperature juice.
If your problem with drinking it right away, however, is that you don’t have enough to make your morning glass, try these options:
- After you’ve made your juicing plan for the week, divide up your produce into sections.
- Use some paper bags or plastic containers to separate out the ingredients for each juicing meal so that they’re ready to go the second you wake up.
- Label each package by meal and day.
- Make sure you use recipes that call for minimal prep time.
8. Use In-Season Ingredients
Whenever possible, choose recipes that use in-season fruits and vegetables for your juicing. In-season produce is better for the environment, your health, and your local economy. You can purchase these fruits and veggies and freeze them for use later on in the year as well.
A Simple Juicing for Beginners Recipe: The Big Green Apple
This delicious three-ingredient recipe is a great place to start. Just purchase the produce within a day’s time and get to chopping.
Ingredients:
- 2 Granny Smith apples
- 2 cups spinach
- 1 orange
Instructions:
- Cut the apples into quarters and remove the seeds and stem. The seeds of an apple contain toxins that you don’t want to store up in your body, so be sure to get all of them. Do not peel the skin off.
- Thoroughly wash the spinach and remove any old or wilting leaves.
- Peel the orange and remove any excess membrane. Cut into quarters and dig out any seeds.
- Place the orange into the blender first, then the spinach, and finally the apple. This order will help the ingredients process more evenly. The orange creates the most immediate liquid which will then swirl out into the others and help them blend together properly.
- Serve within one hour of juicing, though if possible, serve immediately. If you want the juice to be cold, add ice to the blender after you’ve finished juicing the ingredients.
How to Make Fresh Juicing Recipes
When it comes down to answering the question, how to start juicing, it’s quite simple.
Follow these expert tips we’ve shared to keep your juicing recipes easy-to-make, great for your health. They’ll even help you on how to start juicing for weight loss if that’s your goal.
- Use a Blender for Your Juicing Diet Plan
- Start with Simple Recipes
- Find Recipes with Easy to Acquire Ingredients
- Start with Organic Ingredients Only from the Get-Go
- Re-introduce the Pulp into Your Recipes
- Purchase Your Produce Fresh Every Few Days
- Never Keep Juice Longer than an Hour
- Use In-Season Ingredients
Learning how to make fresh juice recipes is easy. And now that you’ve read these tips, you’re ready to grab your blender and start.
Do you have any favorite recipes for homemade juices for weight loss?
Share with us in the comments below.
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