Juicing With A Breville BJE200XL Juicer

Introduction to juicing

Fresh homemade fruit and vegetable juice is great for both the mind and body. To make your own juices, all that is required is a juicer and some fruit and vegetables to use as ingredients. The Breville BJE200XL juicer is an excellent choice because of its features and reasonable price. There are many companies that make these kinds of products including the already mentioned Breville as well as Champion, Black & Decker, Waring, Jack Lalanne, Hamilton Beach, Omega and Magimix. Of course there are other makers of these appliances too.

Everyone has heard the expression “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”. This to me is one of the central themes behind fruit and vegetable juicers. They allow us to consume many more servings per day than if we tried to eat our way through the same quantity of produce. For example six oranges makes a decent sized drink, possibly as much as 500ml. This is a great drink to have along with breakfast, but trying to eat six oranges as well as eat breakfast would be fairly difficult. The difference is that when we juice, we are removing most of the liquid from the fresh produce leaving only the pulp. This is what contains the fiber though. So by juicing we are not getting all the benefits that we could if we actually ate the whole fruit or vegetable. However as has already been mentioned, what we miss out on in terms of fiber is more than compensated, in my opinion, by the sheer quantity of fresh produce it becomes possible to drink when we make our own fresh fruit and vegetable juices. This means that the amounts of vitamins and minerals that we consume through drinking freshly squeezed oranges and so on will be much higher than simply eating a couple of pieces of fruit.

What to look for in a juicer

There are many different brands and models of juicers on the market today. Some are geared towards commercial use while others designed for use in the home. Factors that you may consider to be important include the cost of the unit, how much it can juice before it needs the pulp removed, easy of cleaning and how it juices. Looking at each of these in turn is easy. Firstly juicers may seem expensive initially however for people who already drink fruit and vegetable drinks that are purchased at a juice bar you will know that prices can easily range from $5-$10. So when we consider that the Breville BJE200XL juicer costs about $100 but that once we have our own machine we will be able to make our own drinks for less than it costs to drink out. In effect, the more you juice, the more you will be saving, while becoming healthier at the same time. Secondly the quantity of juice that you want to prepare at a time is an important consideration. This is because each juicer has a different capacity. What this means is that for it to work effectively you may need to remove the pulp that builds up inside so that you can carry on making fresh juice. This can be a pain because the cleaning up is often the least enjoyable part about making homemade health drinks. This leads on to the next point. How easy is it to clean your kitchen juicer? Really the easier, the better. If it takes too long or causes too much hassle it may well be the case that your juicer will be relegated to a cupboard never to see the light of day again. This does not help your health at all. Therefore having a juicer that is quick and easy to clean is, in my opinion, a very important factor. The Breville BJE200XL actually has dishwasher safe parts which means you can just let it do the cleaning for you! Also using a brush to clean the parts where the fruit is pulped allow you to get it completely clean with ease. Finally there are different types of juicers. The Breville model that we are discussing is what is known as a centrifugal juicer. This means that there is a central cylinder that spins very fast and throws the liquid out of the pulp. Some health enthusiasts claim that the high speeds that these juicers operate at causes excess heat which they say promotes oxidation of the fresh juice. While this may be true to a certain degree, for most people this is not something we need to worry overtly about. The juice produced by the Breville BJE200XL juicer still contains loads of health giving goodness.

Reasons to juice

Government advice suggests that we consume five cupfuls of fresh fruit and vegetables per day. By juicing, it is so easy to have much more than this. As has been mentioned above, we do miss out on the fiber that fruit and vegetables contain if we only drink juices. So it would be wise to also eat a few portions each day just to get the whole goodness that they contain.