For more information about Juicers visit the following pages.

• You will always find a juicer of some sort or other in the raw food kitchen. There are essential two main kinds of juicers.

• Centrifugal juicers are the practical, quick and easy juicers.  They work by whizzing a toothed plate at high speed. The produce is dropped on to it down a chute. The juice spins out as the produce is grated up. They juice most produce apart from wheatgrass and harder greens and roots.

• Masticating juicers work by crushing the produce between rotating gears. They juice most things including the harder greens and roots and they juice wheatgrass. They aren't so good with soft produce.

• Generally juices should be consumed freshly made, as the produce has been broken down and starts to oxidize. They taste better fresh anyway.

• Some things just don't juice, like avocado or banana. You can add these in afterwards in the blender.

Centrifugal juicers

• These are the cheaper and practical juicers. If you get one with a wide chute, then all you have to do is wash the produce and put it into chute, either whole, or just chopped up enough to fit. It's best to switch it on with the chute full and the plunger held over the top ready, else you might get splattered.

• They're great at producing green drinks and fruit juices almost on tap, and they're relatively easy to clean.

• They juice at a high speed so you can rapidly juice a lot of fruit.

• You can easily juice apples, pears, celery, carrots, beetroot, peeled oranges, peeled pineapple and similar.

• You can juice the softer stuff like tomatoes or melons too, in fact they're quite good at this.

• You will get less juice overall than you would with a masticating juicer. In fact you can take the pulp from a centrifugal juicer and put it through a masticating juicer to extract quite a bit more juice.

• You can juice all your green stuff like cabbage, broccoli, spinach and so on, but  the yield is never as much as it would be from a masticating juicer. If you have a good supply of green stuff to juice, then this is just academic. From a practical point of view, all you have to do is wash it and shove it down the chute. Can't get any easier.

• You just can't get anything from wheatgrass. The juicer just chops it up and throws it around, but, alas, no juice!

Masticating juicers

• These are the slower, more sedate and refined juicers. They all work by crushing the produce along rotating gears. If there's just one gear, it's called a single auger juicer. It there's two gears working together, then it's called a twin gear juicer.

• These juicers extract every last bit of juice and the pulp that is ejected is nearly dry.

• They are great for wheatgrass.

• They are great for all the harder stuff, that a centrifugal juicer might struggle to get much out of.

• You can juice apples and you get a really good quality juice, but you do have to start with fairly firm crispy apples. The softer ones are a bit of a pain.

• It's not very good with soft fruits like peeled oranges, melons and the like.

• In the more solid models, you can even make nut butters, and cream up coconut meat.

Cold press juicers

• These produce the ultimate juice quality.

• To cold press juice involves a one or two step process, depending on the produce.

• For harder produce like carrots, firstly the produce is ground to a pulp.

• Secondly the pulp is then cold pressed to release the juice.

• For more juicy items, like pineapple, sections of the fruit can be cold pressed directly.

• The most famous juicer in this category is the Norwalk.

Philips HR1861 centrifugal juicer

GS 1000 Green Star Juice Extractor

This is an example of a masticating juicer.

Z-Star manual juicer

This is an example of a masticating juicer. This one is single auger, and it is manual. You can juice wheatgrass with it.