If there’s one thing you’re guaranteed to do as a beginner it’s making mistakes. It’ll happen and you just have to lean into when it happens.
But, you can take some precautions and there are some mistakes you don’t have to make.
Which is why I’m here, I’ve made all the mistakes and come out the other end so I’m going to share some of the most common mistakes that beginners make when they buy a juicer.
In This Article
1. Going Green Too Fast
You’ve heard about how great green juice is, you know you should drink it because it’s crazy healthy, so you buy a juicer, get a great big bag of kale, throw in some celery, some spinach have a swig and!…
Yuck.
You expect it to be tasty because everyone loves it right? Well, the truth is green juice is not that tasty. At least at first, you can acquire a taste for it after a while but in the beginning, it’s rough. So don’t worry! You can have loads of other juices you can enjoy, check out my carrot juice recipes for instance, and if you need to start by adding a lot of apples to your green juice that’s OK too.
It’s a process and it’ll take time to adopt a new healthy habit so take your time and try lots of different juices while you figure out what you like.
2. Buying lots Of Ingredients Before Trying The Juice
This goes hand in hand with the above point before you try a green juice don’t buy 7 days worth of ingredients to have it twice a day. You’re just setting up for the disappointment that way, and you’ll feel bad if you end up wasting all the veggies you bought.
Start slow, buy ingredients for a big glass and specifically for a recipe, try out the recipe see if you like it, or if you’re really going for it see if you can handle it, and then if you do go back and buy a load more ingredients.
You don’t need to go all out straight away, get some ingredients, make a juice, go back and get some different ones to try another juice. Learn to love it instead of flying out the gate hot and feeling bad.
3. Don’t Rush Into A Big Challenge
If you want to follow Joe Cross’s journey and do a 60-day juice fast then all power to you. But don’t do it before you’ve even tasted your juice and figured out the best way to use your juicer.
These things take planning and preparation to execute properly and you’re setting up for failure if you open the box and go for it. Take even a few days and figure out when making juice fits into your schedule, how much the recipe makes, how are you going to take it to work. Are you going to batch make or can you juice each meal?
These are all important things to figure out to ensure your success.
4. Not Batch Making Juice
Speaking of making in batches, do you? You definitely should! If you’ve got a centrifugal juicer your juice will last about 24 hours and if you’ve got a masticating or cold press juicer then your juice will last 48-72 hours. That means you can make 3 days worth of juice at a time-saving time in prep and washing up!
You just need to have the proper juice containers, which I’ve reviewed here, and enough room in your fridge to put them in.
Sometimes you don’t feel like making juice, you wake up late in the morning, you’re tired coming home at night. If you’ve batch made your juice it becomes all the easier to make it a habit and stick to your goals.
Speaking of habits…
5. Not Leaving Your Juicer Out On The Counter
If you have to get your juicer out of the back of a cupboard behind all the pots and pans it just gives you an excuse not to use it. You can’t see it, you forget about it and before long you’re dreams of becoming a juicer are a thing of the past.
So leave it on the counter, or at least somewhere super accessible where you can see it often. I’m sure your coffee machine is accessible so this shouldn’t be any different!
6. Not Washing Your Juicer Straight Away
After I made my first juice I moved my juicer beside the sink and wandered off to drink my juice. A few hours later I came back to wash it…
What a nightmare.
The pulp may as well have turned to cement! The filter was clogged and I had to spend what felt like a lifetime scrubbing it to get it back to normal.
The next time, as soon as I made my juice I turned around and took the juicer apart. Under the running tap, the whole thing was clean in a few minutes.
Lesson learned, clean your juicer straight away and you’ll save yourself a world of frustration! I should note I give it a deeper clean in soapy water every third or fourth use.
7. Not Washing Your Juicer Between Juices
This one’s a bit of a personal preference, maybe I should have said be careful of the order you make your juice because flavours carry over until you wash it.
For instance, if you make a green juice then some orange and carrot juice you’re going to get left with an undertone of green flavour in your juice. Likewise, if you made something with ginger, any following juicers are certainly going to taste of ginger!
You can plan and adjust accordingly, orange juice followed by green juice might taste quite nice for instance.
8. Not Peeling Your Ginger
Speaking of ginger, peel it. Not because it particularly affects the flavour but because it has a good chance of damaging your juicer.
Ginger peel is tough and fibrous and has no juice in it, so it doesn’t crush or chop very well and your juicer has to work hard to push it through.
But, pro-tip you can just scrape the skin off of ginger using a spoon so it doesn’t take very long to get it prepared.
9. Not Experimenting With Recipes
Trying to make up a juice recipe on the spot is difficult, you try and throw some random things together expecting a delicious creation and…
It never quite works.
At least until you’ve been doing it longer you’re best sticking to recipes if you want to experiment and see what’s out there. Why not try out some beet juice recipes and see what you think. Your perfect juice might be out there and you just haven’t found it yet!
10. Adding Too Much Fruit
Now if you have gone ahead and made your recipes anyway and you’ve found the one you like you need to watch out. Because loads of beginner juicer make the mistake of putting way too much fruit into their juice.
Now the fruit is great in juice, it adds sweetness and a load of vitamins and minerals but don’t overdo it. That much sugar can be bad for you, it can be bad for your teeth and cause your blood sugar to spike leaving you with irregular moods and energy levels that are a bit all over the place.
So still have some fruit in your juice, I’m not an animal! But at least half vegetables with the aim of getting towards ¼ fruit to ¾ vegetable ratio.
11. Not Running Pulp Through Twice
This is for those of you who have a centrifugal juicer (I bet it’s a Breville, right?) fast juicers are great because they are just that, fast. But the pulp that comes out is sometimes really wet still, and there’s just a load of juice in the pulp catcher that you’re missing out on!
Which is why you need to start running your pulp through again, this gets the juice you missed and squeezes every ounce of goodness out of your produce.
Just remember to put the pulp into a bowl so you can put the pulp jug back in place and it won’t run through a second time straight onto your counter!
12. Coring Your Apples
Do you core your apples before you juice them?
You should!
When you break down apple seeds, they produce a chemical called amygdalin. When this reaches all the chemical reactions happening inside your stomach, it can be transformed into cyanide.
Tiny amounts of cyanide can be detoxified by your body, so don’t panic – you would need to eat an awful lot of apple seeds before you’d experience any problems. However, I just avoid them completely.
Besides the seeds and stalk can change the taste and leave it a little bitter so you’re better just avoiding them and leaving them out your juicer.
13. Trying To Juice a Banana
I know you want to juice the banana, I know your dying to put the banana through the juicer to get banana juice, but you can’t.
All that happens is you get banana smush pushed out of the pulp ejector. Bananas are one of the things you can’t juice, you can blend them into your juice to give it a thicker texture, or you can eat them alongside your juice, get all that great potassium.
But you can’t put them through the juicer. Although, there is another way you can juice a banana…
14. Not Drinking Water
This is one for those of you doing juice cleanses. Keep drinking water! You need it alongside your juice, because while your juice will give you a lot of water and hydration you still need plenty of water to stave off headaches and hunger pangs.
And this goes for if you aren’t on a fast, you still need to drink plenty of water alongside your daily juice to keep things running smoothly inside your body.
15. Wash Your Ingredients
I know you don’t want to, I know it’d be easier not to, but you need to wash your ingredients. Your juicer doesn’t cook anything so there’s nothing killing any bacteria on the outside of the produce.
Foodborne illnesses are real, and if your buying loose vegetables think about how many hands have picked up and put down that tomato before you picked it up?
You don’t need to wash it if it’s wrapped or in a sealed package. You can be pretty confident that this won’t have anything it shouldn’t have on it.
Conclusion
And there we go!
If you’ve got any mistakes you want to share in the comments then please do, we can help each other out here. And if you’re a beginner and you’ve made some of these mistakes already don’t worry! It happens to us all, it’s how we act from here that counts.
But the biggest mistakes are definitely giving up if you don’t like green juice, there’s a whole world of juicing out there that you can explore and enjoy, it doesn’t have to all be necking back a green juice and trying not to gag.
Happy juicing!
I’m sad that it is supposed to be 3/4 veggies and only 1/4 fruit😰. I don’t like various veggies such as broccoli, spinach, cauliflower, kale and Brussel sprouts. I do like beets, carrots and lettuce though. If ginger is a vegetable, that is amazing because I love anything with ginger in it, I think I could drink pure ginger extract.