Morning Berry Juice

What I made and why

We bought a juicer a few weeks ago because my husband wanted to get into juicing. A friend of mine is into juicing and suggested that we get the Omega NC800 HDR 5th Generation Nutrition Center Juicer. I'll write more about the juicer in another post when I can figure out how to get a video of me making something with it. For now, I'll just keep writing about the recipes that I try. It took a few tries to get a book from the library that was liked. I finally found Superjuicing. We like the layout of the book enough that we'll probably buy it after we try a few more recipes. I'l write more about the book in another post too. There are a lot of recipes that I want to try, but today, I picked Morning Berry Juice. I picked it because it had carrots in it and I want more carrots in my life. I've added them to my salad, but I just don't think half of a carrot is enough to really make a difference, so I'm trying other things like juice!

Morning Berry Juice

This contained a whopping three ingredients. They were grapefruit, strawberries and baby carrots. We don't buy baby carrots anymore, so I used a whole carrot. 

The Ingredients

Here is what I pulled out of the fridge to make my juice.

Once I peeled everything, I realized that my carrot wasn't big enough, so I pulled another one out of the fridge. I also discovered that my grapefruit wasn't big enough either, so I pulled another one out of the fridge too. I had plenty of strawberries though!

I couldn't take a pictures while I was making the juice, but I'll put that in a post when hubby can operate the juicer and I can take pictures. The strawberries and carrot were small into to fit in into the food hopper thing, but the grapefruit needed to be pulled apart into smaller sections. 

The bin on the left is the waste bin and the bin on the right is the juice bin. The juice bin is smaller than the waste bin, so I thought that I would end up with more waste than juice, but so far that hasn't happened. 

The recipe said that it would be 1-1/2 cups. I think it was a little bit more than that though. This is a 16 ounce mason jar, and the juice took up more than 3/4 of it so it has to be more than a cup and a half. You can see that this juice came out pretty pulpy.

Here is the waste mashed into a measuring cup. It over filled my 1/3 cup measuring cup, so I think it was about 3/4 of cup. I'm pretty impressed with how much juice came out of this stuff. 

The Verdict

This juice came out pretty pulpy. I'm not a fan of pulpy juices. I always buy the non-pulp orange juice. I powered this down though because I didn't want to waste the ingredients. The predominant flavor was the grapefruit. I really couldn't taste anything other than the grapefruit. While I was drinking it, the flavor was fine. However, when I stopped drinking, there was an after taste that I wasn't very fond of. It was almost bitter to me. Hubby said that it was pretty tart. I didn't really get the tart though. I definitely didn't taste the strawberries, but I'm not sure how much of the strawberries got through. Not much strawberry pulp came out of the machine and there appeared to be a bit of strawberry left in the auger when I pulled it apart to clean it. If I make this again, I might put the strawberries through first to see if grapefruit will help push the strawberries through better. I'm still learning how to use the machine though so maybe I need to do something different with the nozzle on the end. It has numbers, but we don't know what they are for. 

The Book

The recipes in this book are super simple. They tell you what you need and then they also tell you how many ounces or grams it should be. So for example, this recipe called for 1 peeled medium red or pink grapefruit. It then says that it should be 13 oz or 360 grams. It also tells how many servings you should get and how many cups, mL or grams that should be. This book lists the calories, fat, saturated fat, protein, carbs and fiber for each recipe. It also gives you the percentages of vitamins and minerals that you'll get. It even gives the phytochemicals such as beta-carotene, I love this book! The pages are all in glossy color too so it's quite eye appealing. Well now that I've talked so much about the book, I should just skip the post about the book. :)