Top 5 Vegetable Juices

carolinest | May 30, 2010 |

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How do you decide what to juice? You can try the experimentation method; that means thinking about what fruit and vegetables you like to eat, in particular the combinations you eat together, and grabbing your juicer to see how it turns out. However, this is far from foolproof. On a Sunday, I could eat a side order of green peas, broccoli and mange-tout with my roast beef, but I'm not convinced that would make the most delicious juice.

Alternatively, a little research into typical combinations and complementary foods will do wonders for the taste and nutritional value of your juice. Fresh juice has loads of health benefits, but as vegetable juices or fruit and veg combinations are better for your blood sugar and energy levels than pure fruit juice, here are a few suggestions to start you off:

First, try carrot, pear, orange and apple juiced in around equal quantities. This is a great juice to start off with as carrots are one of the sweetest vegetables out there, so if you are not yet used to the taste of vegetable juices this will ease you in gently. Pears are also very sweet and counterbalance the tang of oranges. To juice an orange, always remove the skin as it is really bitter and will ruin your juice. This is the only skin that you need to remove, all other items can be left fully intact.

Another great juice to try is spinach, apple and pineapple. A couple of large handfuls of spinach should be enough, with roughly equal quantities of apple and pineapple juice. Spinach is one of the so-called 'superfoods'. Although superfood might be an exaggeration, spinach does have a very high nutritional content. This is also where a masticating juicer comes to the fore, as if you have a centrifugal juicer, you will get very low juice extraction from fresh spinach, but a single gear juicer, or masticating juicer, will get a fantastic yield as leafy greens like these are what these juicers were originally designed for.

For a truly cleansing and detoxing juice a great combination is celery, beet, cucumber and lime. Cucumbers have a very high water content, which will cleanse and hydrate your body and celery has high levels of potassium, calcium and amino acids, amongst many other things. Beets operate like carrots in that as well as being excellent for your health, they are sweeter than most other vegetables so will be a delicious addition to your juice.

Broccoli is a vegetable that many people wouldn't think about juicing, but it is one of the most nutritious vegetables to juice. A tasty mix is a few florets of broccoli juiced with 3 or 4 carrots and a wedge of lemon. Adding lemon or limes to your juices is a great way of improving the taste and they are also high in vitamin C. Carrots are well known to be high in vitamin A, which is why folklore suggests they enable you to see in the dark.

There couldn't be a juice top 5 without including wheatgrass juice. Drunk by itself, with a wedge of lime or added to your favourite juice it's another superfood, rich in amino acids, live enzymes, vitamins and minerals. My favourite wheatgrass drink is 25ml wheatgrass with half a bulb of fennel, 1/4 pineapple and a small knob of ginger. Fennel and pineapple are both great for digestion and mixed with the ginger and wheatgrass it makes a really interesting combination.

Of course, part of the fun is finding things out for yourself, so the above is great for a starting point and after that the world is really your oyster.