Ted's Blog

Are the three glasses of juice expensive because of $100 / 3 = $33, or are carrots expensive? I'm hoping the former. Perhaps you can work out a chart that shows the cost per glass of juice and at what point on that chart you feel like you've gotten a good deal.

Ted,
You can buy a drink called V-8 splash or even Diet V-8 splash. It is yummy. Especially with a little Vodka. The main ingredient is carrots. There are lots of different flavors. They are all good! You can recycle the bottle when you're through. No juicer required, just shake, open, and pour.

Expensive because I'm dividing the price over the machine over the glasses of juice. Also I tried grapefruit juice but it wasn't worth the trouble. Carrots work really well because they're pretty cheap ($2.50 for 5 pounds which makes 6 or 7 servings of juice). Plus carrots keep for a long time.

The Juiceman says V-8 is no good because pasteurization and oxidation cause a loss of nutrients. It's best to drink the juice right away. Plus V-8 contains added salt (that's why it tastes good) and isn't really juice at all but watered down tomato paste.

Juiceman is wrong! He is jealous of V-8!

This is the review I posted on Amazon after about 15 pounds of carrots:

I bought this juicer so that I could get the nutrition of eating vegetables without eating a lot of them. I've been using it for about a month and it works fine, but with some qualifications.

It seems designed for shredding carrots or other hard vegetables. The carrot juice produced has no pulp (some foam) and tastes better than I thought. You can add an apple for sweetness, but it tastes fine plain to me. Carrots are ideal for juicing because they are cheap and have a lot of vitamins and who wants to eat 5 big carrots when you can drink half a glass of juice?

I've tried the juicer with apples and it produces good juice but the pulp sticks to the inside of the machine and builds up. I've tried grapefruit according to the instructions which is to remove the colored part of the peel, but leave the white on. This creamy juice was terrible.

I don't see why you would want to juice expensive good-tasting fruit like strawberries, grapes, cantaloupe, etc. And grapefruit are easy enough to eat and taste good too. Orange and apple juice are so easy and cheap to buy I don't see any reason to make that either.

So if you just use it for carrots I think it will work out great for you. I've read some concerns about oxidation and I believe it is best to make just as much juice as you will drink right away rather than store it for a week. The manual seems to recommend drinking it quickly too.

Cleanup is very easy. I just rinse the parts and lightly scrub the strainer with a scouring pad to get rid of the little bits that stick in there. It takes a couple of minutes but I'm not obsessive about how clean it needs to be. At first the smokey plastic part on top stained orange, but now it doesn't. It seems like they could have just made the machine orange because carrots essentially produce orange ink.

A lot of waste is produced (a pound of carrots produces about 6 oz of juice which is about a third, so two-thirds is waste) and I wonder how much nutrition goes with that. The spout cover comes off every time I use the machine so I don't use it anymore and it doesn't spill. Not all the shredded material goes into the basket, some gets slung onto the counter or backsplash. It also produces a fair amount of noise though if you hold it down firmly on the counter it is pretty quiet.

Anyway, it's a pretty good machine for what it does and I've been happy with it.

Death of Juiceman

I was throwing some grapes in with carrots and a part broke off. Since that part clamped down the top and the top has to be snug for the machine to run it stopped working (until I pushed down on the top). I called the people who made it and they sent me a new part. Now I'm back to juicing!