It’s a familiar scenario: you’re feeling excellent with your homemade fresh juice. It tastes great and you know that your healthy eating plans are going well. Then you notice your leftover juice pulp.
It seems a shame to waste juicer pulp, especially since it has so much nutrition. At least, that’s how I felt.
So I looked into it and I’ve discovered lots of delicious ways and creative ways to use the pulp leftover from making your favorite fruit juice or green juice. They range from recipes that require a bit of prep, to ideas as easy as using the juice pulp as compost to give back to the earth, especially if you grow your own produce – just one good use for juice pulp and food waste.
So here are my favorite ways to use your leftover juice pulp!
In This Article
Vegetable Pulp vs Fruit Pulp
There are some things you can only make with fruit pulp (or that you’d only want to make with fruit pulp), likewise for vegetable pulp.
I’ve also included some recipes that you can use either or both types of pulp for.
This list is organised into:
- Uses for vegetable pulp
- Uses for fruit pulp
- Uses for any pulp
So I’ve tried to organise the list roughly into uses of pulp from fruit, and uses of pulp from vegetables and of course uses for any pulp.
Now that I’ve said the word ‘pulp’ more than any person should, let’s get to the list.
What To Do With Vegetable Pulp
Veggie pulp is good because there is a lot of cooking you can do with it. It’s easy to add to recipes to bulk them out and add extra flavour.
Here are my favorite uses for veggie pulp!
1. Add Extra Flavour to Your Burgers
It’s possible to substitute whatever you normally use as filler in your burgers for vegetable pulp.
For example, in beef burgers or meatballs, it’s common to use bread crumbs as the filler.
Rather than relying on these, you can use the same amount of dry vegetable pulp instead and it adds extra nutrients, fibre and taste. Spinach pulp is great for this.
If you’re making vegan or veggie burgers, then carrot or sweet potato pulp works nicely in black bean burger patties.
2. Save It for Vegetable Stock
You probably won’t get enough in a single batch, but you can freeze juice pulp along with any other vegetable scraps you have to make delicious vegetable stock.
Or you can add it to chicken stock, or any other bone broth you might be making.
If you decide to make veggie broth this way, be sure to add salt near the end of the process. It’s important to wait before adding the salt since the stock will reduce as it cooks and it’s easy to over-season it.
If you get it right, then your vegetable broth will be the talk of the town – and it’ll be down to the perfect stock. Oh, and be wary of Kale, it has a very strong flavor!
3. Add It To an Omelette
Hopefully, you’ll have an easier time than me if you attempt this – I cannot cook an omelette to save my life. Every time I do, it ends up as scrambled eggs.
When you’re making your omelette, add the vegetable pulp straight into the eggs while they’re cooking.
Make sure you use dry vegetable pulp for this, since it’s not as nice when you use wet.
4. Use It To Make Muffins
Or cakes. Or cupcakes.
Carrot pulp in a carrot cake is a perfect combination!
There are so many recipes out there for how to include vegetable pulp in your baking, with lots of vegan and gluten-free options too.
Like this one – vegan oatmeal, with the vegetable pulp as an extra ingredient to make it even better.
If you’re going to give this a go, carrot tends to make your recipe sweeter, so you might want to use less sugar or honey than normal.
If you’re not that familiar with baking and don’t trust yourself to substitute, here’s a recipe for juice pulp muffins. Give it a go!
5. Make Easy Lentil Soup
I promise I’m not biased, but this is another recipe that works nicest with carrot pulp.
Put red lentils into a crockpot, then add your leftover pulp and some water. Mix in salt, garlic and black pepper, then let it cook for a few hours.
That’s it!
You can even do this with frozen juice pulp, so you don’t have to make soup every single time you’re juicing. You can save it up over time, then make a big batch of soup.
Easy lunches to take to work!
6. Feed It To Your Chickens
I appreciate that this won’t help everyone but if on the slim chance that you have chickens, or you know someone that does, this is a great way to use your leftover pulp!
You can feed juice pulp straight to chickens, you don’t have to do anything to it. Just sprinkle it out with their usual feed and they’ll love it.
Another positive is that anything they don’t eat will fertilize the ground.
What To Do With Fruit Pulp
Hungry for more?
Fruit pulp is slightly different to vegetable pulp in the ways you can use it because it has quite a different taste – as you’d expect.
7. Eat it
Unlike vegetable pulp, fruit pulp can actually be quite tasty by itself, especially apple pulp but otehr fruits work just as well.
If you aren’t keen on that, you can mix it in with some natural yoghurt for a really tasty treat.
Fruit pulp is nicest if it’s still a bit wet, so if you have a really good juicer you might struggle with this. A good juicer will extract every last bit of moisture and goodness from your fruit, which means excellent juices but poor pulp.
8. Make Fruit Leather
Hold your trousers up the eco-friendly way!
I’m kidding, I’m kidding.
Fruit leather is really tasty and a great healthy treat for a kid’s lunch box (or a grown-up’s lunch box, I’m not judging).
To make fruit leather, you spread the fruit pulp onto a baking sheet, after adding sweeteners like lemon juice if you want them. Pop the tray into your oven on the lowest heat and keep it in there for several hours – possibly up to 12!
It might not be the most efficient but it’s a fun treat and gives you the chance to make your fruit roll-ups.
9. Make Raw Pizza Crust
This is an interesting one. I came across this delicious recipe on Get Rawcous.
It involves using the fruit pulp to bind together different ground seeds in a food processor, which all get squeezed together to create a flat pizza dough. You dehydrate this pizza dough on a dehdrator sheet and then you have a raw pizza crust!
It’s a unique idea but can be a problem if you don’t have, or don’t have access to, a dehydrator.
10. Freeze Into Ice Cubes For Smoothies
This one I really liked! Add the leftover juicing pulp to a little bit of water and pour it into an ice cube tray.
Then when you’re next making a frozen smoothie you can use these ice cubes to make it extra thick and perfectly chilled.
11. Put It Straight Into Smoothies
Alternatively, avoid the bother of freezing it first and add the fruit pulp straight to your smoothie (although you can always freeze after).
This is great if you’ve added too much liquid and your smoothie’s come out a little runny. A few big spoonfuls of fruit pulp thicken it up and also make it even tastier.
You could also use vegetable pulp for this, but fruit pulp will go with a wider range of smoothie recipes.
12. Make a Natural Face Mask
You can put wet juice pulp straight onto your skin and use it as a face mask. Just leave it there for a few minutes, wash it off and see how you feel.
Not everyone likes it, which is understandable, but I know many people love how refreshed their skin feels afterwards.
Uses for Vegetable Pulp and/or Fruit Pulp
These ideas can work with either type of pulp – they’re really versatile and methods you can depend on to use up your leftover pulp.
13. Put It In A Bokashi Bin (Compost)
Like I said earlier, this is the easiest way to use your leftover pulp, since it requires next to no effort.
If you have a garden with space for a compost bin, then just throw the pulp in. Simple.
If space is valuable though, or you don’t have a garden, then a bokashi bin (here’s a link to Amazon with my favourite) is an excellent alternative.
It’s a kitchen composter, which works by piling kitchen scraps (like juice pulp) with something called inoculated bran – this is what activates the composting process.
You fill it up, leave it for 10-12 days and then you have a small bucket of compost.
14. Make Juice Pulp Crackers
I put these juice pulp crackers in this section because I know some people who like a sweet cracker, made with fruit pulp, but for most people, it’s vegetable pulp all the way.
There are a lot of different recipes online but here’s a pretty easy one to get you started:
- Mix 3 cups of juice pulp, 1 cup of water, ½ cup of almond/coconut flour and ¼ cup of chia seeds.
- At this point, you can also add any spices you want, like salt, pepper or garlic. If you’re making sweet fruit pulp crackers, then you could consider adding cinnamon or your favrorite spices to your mixture.
- Spread it out as thin as possible on a baking sheet. It’ll be very stiff, so try covering your pulp mix with another baking sheet and pressing that if you’re having trouble.
- Bake it at around 350F for 30 minutes or until it’s brown and smells toasted.
- Take out your cooked mixture and cut it before it cools ,otherwise it’ll crumble.
Adding rolled oats to these baked goods can bulk these out and add some texture too.
15. Add It To Pancakes
I love sweet pancakes, so it’s fruit pulp for me all the way but you can make some nice dinner pancakes by adding vegetable pulp.
These are simple too. Just take your normal pancake batter and throw in about a cup of pulp! Mix it all and cook it as normal. How much juice pulp you add is up to you, but I would start with a small amount and add little bits until you’re happy with the consistency. Ginger pulp is great for making your pancakes a little spicy.
16. Make Dog Biscuits
Some dogs will just eat the pulp as it is, but others get very bad gas if you do this – it depends on your dog!
If you have 3-4 cups of juice pulp, just add in ½ cup of peanut butter, 1 cup of oats and ¼ cup of ground flaxseed. Roll this mixture into 1 inch balls and cook for an hour at 300, turning once halfway through.
You can mix all of it with your hands and, pro tip, rub some olive oil on your hands first so you won’t get as much of the mixture stuck on your fingers.
However, be extremely careful about the types of fruit pulp or vegetable pulp that you give to your dog since certain things are harmful to them. No onions and no grapes in these dog treats, please!
Conclusion
And there you go!
I’d say that composting your juice pulp is still the easiest option but there are so many creative ways to use it, there’s no reason to be throwing it in the trash!
There are some ideas that I couldn’t get to in this article, like lasagna, zucchini fritters with cream cheese, or quick bread recipes to name a few more – so be imaginative with how you use your leftover pulp!
If you find other uses for fruit pulp or vegetable pulp, please add them to the comments below, I’d love to hear them! If they’re really good ideas, I’ll add them to the main article and credit you for them.
Do people really put onions in their juice? These are good ideas! I never thought about dog biscuits, that’s a great idea, too bad I threw in a handful of grapes at the end of today’s juice! I was rolling the carrot pulp into tiny balls and feeding my pug! He loved it! Thanks for the ideas!