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How To Clean and Maintain Your Juicer

A glass of fresh, delicious, and nutritious juice is all you need to kick-start your day on a positive note. A high-quality and well-maintained juicer is a prerequisite for churning out tasty and healthy juices enriched with vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients.

Like every other kitchen appliance, a juicer needs proper care and maintenance for ensuring optimal performance over a long period. As the juicer is an expensive kitchen gadget, ensure to clean it regularly to keep running at its full potential.

Cleaning and maintaining your juicer helps you to make savings on its premature replacement. Explore this article to learn about the easy steps of maintaining your juicer and enjoying the benefits of juicing.

Let’s discuss the effective cleaning and maintenance tips that help you avoid common juicer issues and ensure a long lifespan of your juicer.

Use the Appropriate Juicer for the Juicing Tasks

Modern juicers come in three basic types: centrifugal juicers, cold press or masticating juicers, and triturating juicers. You should use a juicer that perfectly matches the juicing tasks at hand.

The blade or centrifugal juicers work great for juicing citrus or apple fruits; however, these don’t give good juicing results with green leafy vegetables like kale or spinach.

On the other hand, masticating juicers are ideally suitable for juicing all types of fruits and vegetables. The triturating juicers are commonly used at professional juice shops, and they have two augers for grinding fruits and vegetables and extracting the juice.

If you intend to make juice of fruits like apple and citrus fruits, use blade juicers. If you make juice of fibrous and tough vegetables more often, use masticated juicers designed for handling wear and tear of regular usage instead of blade juicers.

Remove Seeds and Pits Before Juicing

Ensure to remove the seeds and pits of fruits before putting them in your juicer. The hard pits or seeds of fruits like peaches, cherries, apricots, etc., carry the risks of damaging the juicer components. So ensure to put only de-pitted fruits in your juicer jar.

Also, remember to remove the smaller and softer pits and seeds of the fruits, as these can make your juice tasting harsh and bitter.

Moreover, some fruits like apricots, apples, plums, peaches, etc., contain seeds that can be processed into harmful cyanide when consumed in the body. Thus, you need to remove the seeds and pits of such fruits.

Detach the Removable Parts

Your electric juicer comprises various removable parts. You need to assemble them for juicing your fruits and vegetables. When you are not using your electric juicer, ensure to detach the removable parts and store them separately.

Go through the user manual for instructions regarding the removal of the detachable parts. In addition to providing convenient storage, it helps in cleaning the difficult to reach areas.

Avoid Juicing Ingredients With Low-Liquid Content

To get effective juicing results, avoid juicing the ingredients with low-liquid content like coconut, cereals, grains, etc. This is because the dry ingredients may damage your juicer in the long run. Moreover, juicing the ingredients with low water content doesn’t produce much juice.

Use the Recommended Accessories Only

Ensure to use the accessories compatible with your electric juicer as recommended by your manufacturer. Avoid using local accessories as they may damage your electric appliance.

If you find any issue with your electric juicer functioning, seek professional help and call your customer care centre.

Use the Recommended Plunger of Your Juicer Set

Always use the plunger that comes with your juicer for pushing the fruit or other food items into your juicer. A plastic or hard-rubber plunger is designed to fit perfectly into your juicer’s fruit chute.

If you try to use any other object like a fork instead of a plunger, it may cause severe damage to your juicer. Moreover, it may also cause injuries as the juicers are not engineered for withstanding the hard objects inserted into their augers or blades.

Ensure to Clean Your Juicer Regularly

Don’t leave your electric juicer clogged after the juicing process. The more you procrastinate and delay cleaning your juicer, the shorter your juicer’s lifespan will be. The dried juice and fruit remnants need to be cleaned quickly once you have completed the juicing.

Ensure to clean the juicer thoroughly, as the residual dried juice and fruit fragments may render your juice tasting worse while making juice in the future. Moreover, the dried juice build-up may hamper the internal functioning of your juicer.

As the juicers come with removable components, you can easily detach them and clean them thoroughly after every use.

Increase the Speed of Your Electric Juicer Gradually

Don’t jump the guns using your electric juicer and gradually shift from low to medium speed and then high speed. This ensures smooth and effective juicer performance and improves the durability of your appliance.

Store It in a Proper Place

To increase the lifespan of your electric juicer, clean it properly and store it in an appropriate place. To do so, fix a place in your kitchen cabinet where you can keep your juicer after using it.

Store your juicer in a dry place and away from the dust and dirt. Ensure to store your juicer in the disassembled state by keeping all the components separately.

While you may be consuming juices every day as part of your healthy diet routine, you may be making certain mistakes during the juicing process. Let’s discuss some do’s and don’t of juicing that help you to avoid making common mistakes while making juice.

Do’s of Juicing

Provides Easy and Quick Nutrition

Juicing is a great way of accessing quick and easily digestible nutrition. It provides rapid nutrient delivery and gives boosts of energy before a game or event. The high liquid content of the juice ensures that it doesn’t require chewing and mechanical breakdown in the stomach.

Thus, the nutrients in the juice are readily and quickly absorbed in the body. As a result, juicing provides an ideal way of replenishing energy and nutrients in athletes and stressed individuals.

Ensures Proper Balance of Nutrients

Adding juices to your diet serves as an ideal way of achieving the balance of the required nutrients in the body. You can combine juices with a source of proteins and fats like a sprinkle of hemp seeds and chia seeds or a few pistachios and cashews.

This makes you feel fuller for longer durations while providing your body with the required vitamins and minerals.

Provides a Convenient Way of Adding Green Leafy Veggies to Your Diet

Juicing offers an easy way of incorporating green leafy veggies into your diet. You may not be eating these vegetables raw, but you can readily consume them in juice form.

Prepare juice of dark leafy green vegetables like chard, broccoli, and kale enriched with calcium, folate, vitamin C, vitamin K, and calcium. Moreover, you can also prepare veggies juice like baby broccoli, celery, parsley, and cilantro.

Thus, juicing green vegetables helps you receive extra nutrition doses to meet your daily dietary vegetable requirements.

Don’t of Juicing 

Using Juicing for Replacing Your Meals

Don’t use juice as your meal replacement strategy. If you take only apple and pear juices, it doesn’t serve an adequate diet as it does not meet the protein and fat requirements, even though it is enriched with carbohydrates.

On the other hand, if you consume dark green leafy vegetable juices, you will get only minerals, vitamins, and phytochemicals. Thus, it keeps you deprived of other essential nutrients and carbohydrates required by the body.

The juice only diet may cause nutritional imbalances resulting in blood sugar spikes and mood swings. Thus, you must avoid using juicing as a way of replacing your regular meals as it leaves you with a weakened metabolism and diminished energy.

Use juicing as an important component of your meals rather than a complete replacement.

Throwing Away the Pulp After Juicing

The residual pulp of the fruits after the juicing is not a waste. It is enriched with important fibres, and it can be used for preparing delicious and healthy recipes like smoothies, hummus, pesto, etc. Thus, don’t throw away the pulp after juicing your fruits and vegetables.

Allowing Juice to Sit

Ensure to consume the freshly-prepared juice as soon as possible. If you allow it to sit, it may begin to oxidize, and its nutrients start to degrade. If you need to store it overnight, pack it in an air-tight container and add a few lemon drops for preserving it.

Consuming Sugary Fruits

Don’t consume too much sugary fruit juices as these contain high levels of fructose. This may result in increased insulin levels and promote sugar cravings.

Thus, you should replace the juices of high-sugar produce fruits like watermelon, grapes, mango, cherries, and bananas with low sugar fruits like lime, berries, avocados, etc.

Yes, you should clean your juicer thoroughly after every use. If you leave your juicer dirty for long, the dried juice and tiny remnants of fruits get hardened and set in quickly. To avoid the concentrated pigment and pulp from drying out, clean your juicer parts quickly after use.