Juice Pulp

Going on a juice fast? Dry the juice pulp and use it later

You can dehydrate and powder this nutritious and abundant juice pulp.  Use it to add fibre, flavour, and a nutritional boost to your baking.

Recently, I watched the documentary Sick, Fat, and Nearly Dead.  In the movie, Australian Joe Cross embarks on a journey across America and he doesn’t eat American food.  Instead, he carts a Breville Juicer in the back of his car and lives off green vegetable juice for 60 days.  On his journey, he loses weight, improves his health, and mentors some friends to begin their journey to a healthier lifestyle.  It was inspiring to see the healthy changes that Joe and his friends achieved by juicing.  Don’t we all want to take some time off, lose a little weight, reverse our lifestyle diseases, and get our health back?  And the investment was so small — merely 2 months and the cost of a juicer and fresh vegetables — to regain health that was lost over decades of dietary abuse.

The movie inspired me to buy a Breville Juicer and start green juicing.  So far we haven’t embarked on a juice fast, but that might be in the future.  For now, we are just getting introduced to this magical machine.

In this post, I want to tell you a bit about the Breville Juicer we bought and offer you the basic juicer recipe I’m using.  Plus, I wanted to share what I am doing with the copious vegetable pulp that is leftover from making daily veggie juice.

Why the Breville Juice Fountain Elite?

I picked this particular juicer because it was highly recommended.  Joe uses a Breville juicer in the movie.  I read the recommendations of a few of my blogging friends, too, and that convinced me to give this juicer a try.  So far I love what it can do.

There are a lot of juicers on the market — remember Jack LaLanne’s Power Juicer?  That was my first introduction to kitchen juicers.  When I was a kid, I saw advertisements on TV.  I have a steam juicer for fruit juice.  But we’ve never bought a raw food juicer before.

The Breville is a centrifugal juicer that is calibrated to do a better job at juicing leafy greens, than other brands of centrifugal juicers.  It seems to work well for my purposes.  When I put a large handful of lettuce, chard, kale, and parsley through it on low, the greens were about 60% juiced.  There were bits of parsley in the pulp, but overall it was satisfactory.  The pulp is still somewhat moist.  You could put the pulp through a second time if you wanted to extract more juice.

If you need to juice wheatgrass, you may want a dedicated wheatgrass juicer, but for a general all-in-one juicer, I am pleased with the Breville Juice Fountain Elite.

How to use the Breville Juicer

Juicer Recipe — yield 16 to 20 ounces

The standard green juice is made from a base of

2 organic apples

1 organic lemon

1-2 inch piece of raw organic ginger  (it’s warming)

 

Add to this base three to four of any the following:

1 large handful of spinach, arugula, mustard greens, or chard

1 large handful of lettuce, parsley, kale, or beet greens

1/4 of a cabbage, cored

2 sticks of celery, washed and trimmed

4 carrots, washed with the ends trimmed

1/4  of a pineapple, peeled

3-inch piece of cucumber washed

1 orange, washed

1/2 beet, peeled

 

Prepare your fruits and vegetables by washing well.  The beet should be peeled because beet peels will give a bitter taste to your juice.  The other vegetables can go through the juicer without peeling.

To make your green juice, turn the juicer on low with the waste bucket and the juice pitcher in place.  Listen for the sound to change to a steady hum.  Insert an apple in the hopper.  Wad up the green leaves and shove them in the shoot.  Follow with the lemon.  Push down with the push stick to engage the filter basket and the grater blades.  Add the other vegetables one at a time, pushing each addition down with the push stick, slowly.  Finish with the 2nd apple.  You’ll get around 20 ounces with this recipe — enough for 1 person for one meal on a juice fast, or 2 people for a juice supplement.

The recommended Juice Fast includes 4 to 6 16 oz. servings of fresh juice plus lemon water, coconut water, and herbal tea.  Find out more about juice fasting from the Reboot with Joe blog.  This may be in my future.

What to do with the juice pulp

The problem I have with juicing is the bucket of pulp.  The juicer extracts about 60 to 70% of the nutrients and soluble fibre from the fruit and vegetables.  There’s 40% of the nutrients plus indigestible fibre in the pulp.  It seems like good nutrition going to waste to compost all that leftover pulp.

Just like you can dehydrate and powder green weeds from the garden, and use them in smoothies and stock, so you can dehydrate and powder this nutritious and abundant juicer pulp.  Use it to add fibre, flavour, and a nutritional boost to your baking.

Start by dehydrating the pulp on a dehydrator tray.  You do have a dehydrator, don’t you?

Once the pulp is fully dry, put it in your blender and grind it to a fine powder.  I used a Magic Bullit Nutribullet for this job.  It’s easier to clean than my Vitamix.

That’s it.  It’s ready to add to your bread dough, muffins, crackers, cookies, smoothies, gravy, and sauces.  The flavour is mild, with a hint of sweetness. It contains flavour, nutrition, as well as fibre.

If you are on a juice fast, just save the dried and powdered veggie pulp and you’ll have a lot to bake with when you reintroduce solid food to your diet.

What’s your favourite juicer recipe?  I need more inspiration.