Juicing has become a popular practice over the past year, but there’s key things to remember.
We live in a world with highly processed foods that are loaded with refined sugar, salt, fat and additives and they are often cheaper than natural foods like vegetables and fruit. This has resulted in many families opting to eat ‘food’ of a lower nutritional quality simply because they cannot, or believe they cannot, afford to eat well. Juicing, in particular, is often viewed as an expensive option that is only available to the well-off, but does that have to be the case? Over the past year many people have used the free juicing programmes on my website naturaljuicejunkie.com and from the feedback I’ve received, I know that it is possible to do a juice cleanse for as little as £3.25 per day, less than the price of a single fast food meal. Here are my top tips for juicing on a budget.
Grow your own (or forage)
One of the cheapest ways to get high quality, fresh and organic produce is to grow it yourself. You don’t need lots of space either. You can easily grow a good mvariety of produce in just a metre or two or outdoor space. In fact, you can even grow leafy greens indoors in a windowsill garden. Even better still why not go foraging for wild edibles?
Use seasonal ingredients
Using seasonal (and ideally local) ingredients helps to ensure you have a variety of produce in your juices across the year. It also helps manage your food budget as fresh produce is nearly always cheaper when it is in season.
Make friends with your freezer
Have you been foraging and have now got more fresh berries than you could ever consume? Or maybe, you have some shop purchased produce that will soon be beyond it’s best? You can pre-make and freeze your juices or freeze ingredients like berries, avocado and bananas that can then be blended into juices to make delicious smoothies.
Get a cold press / masticating juicer
Cold press juicers (also called slow juicers or masticating juicers) make a higher quality juice, but more perhaps more importantly for juicers on a budget, they also save you money.
For example, If you spend £30 a week on fresh vegetables and fruits for juicing, using a cold press juicer you could save between £10.50 and £15.00 each week through increased yield when compared to traditional centrifugal models. This is due to cold press juicers producing a much dryer pulp than traditional centrifugal juicers, typically getting 35% to 50% more juice from the ingredients.
Upcycle your juice pulp
Want some free ingredients for use in cakes, soups, vegetarian roasts and countless other dishes? Then make use of your juice pulp. By getting creative with the order that you juice your ingredients you can easily select specific pulp for use in other recipes, such as carrot cake using carrot pulp, chocolate orange cheesecake using orange pulp or vegetable broth using the pulp from leafy greens and celery.
