Continuing on from part 1 of this post, ‘To juice or not to juice‘, we had tried the VonShef juicer and although it was a bargain for the price and would be an ideal solution for many, it just wasn’t up to our demanding carrot juicing needs!

Determined to find the right solution, my girlfriend spent many hours reading through UK and Polish juicing and health forums, product reviews and guides.

And found the Kuvings Cold Press Juicer for £341.

This juicer promised to deliver everything we wanted – slow pressed healthy juice and no need to chop up carrots!

We always look around for the cheapest price, taking into account any cash-back deals through TopCashBack. I don’t recall which was best at the time as prices seem to fluctuate, but there’s currently a good deal on Amazon and a few for sale on eBay for less than we paid.

When it arrived it was like an early Christmas for my girlfriend.

Unpackaging the contents of the box, she wasn’t disappointed, and kept bringing me parts with a big smile on her face saying “ooo its so small!” and “FEEL the quality!”.

It did feel pretty solid. But would it meet our expectations?

Well, it looked the part – surprisingly small and in a lovely deep red colour (here’s ours in red, there’s a silver one and I believe you can find in black and white too).

We powered her up and started juicing.

The results were very good. Carrots could be fed in whole. No more time consuming chopping! And the results were better than the VonShef; still some froth, but plenty of beautiful juice and NO clogging this time! And it was sooo quiet!

We’ve been using for two or three months now, and we are happy to report success. We are juicing about 5 days a week, getting through approximately 8kg of carrots, 4-6kg of apples, 1kg of beetroot and 20 grapefruits a week.

And it’s coping admirably.

We are now chopping the carrots a little to help – it copes with whole carrots but you can see that the unit is under some pressure and the plastic parts are being strained – we are slicing each carrot into 4 pieces (not much effort) in an attempt to prolong the products life.

The juicer has a cap system, whereby you can close the cap and put water in the system to rinse it, and open to cap to wash it through. This works well, but if you are planning on making one stronger flavoured juicer and one milder, consider making the milder one first, as the flavour may remain unless you wash the whole unit properly.

The unit does get warm after about half an hour. However, its rare that we need to juice for longer than that. If you purchase a different juicer to the Kuvings, ensure it has good ventilation near the motor; the VonShef we had previously didn’t.

Being a slow juicer, it’s not fast in it’s operation – but the time saved in chopping fruit & veg that we had to do for the VonShef, and indeed, many other pricier models, is huge and more than compensates – especially to be able to have healthy, slow pressed juice. It’s relatively easy to clean too – it even comes with a brush and a handy circular tool to clean out hard to reach areas.

Ok, it still struggles a bit with leaves. But from all the research we’ve done, most juicers do, except those specifically developed for leaves – and then those ones struggle with harder vegetables such as carrot.

If you are juicing celery, rhubarb, or anything with long fibres, then these must be chopped into short pieces to break the length of the fibres. Due to the nature of the vertical juicer, with a 90 degree angle going down, long fibres can cause the juicer to clog and even become damaged. If you want to regularly make juice mainly with leaves, celery, wheatgrass and other fibrous vegetables, then you may need to buy a horizontal juicer.

So perhaps it’s true – if you want an ideal, complete solution – you do need to spend £3000 on a ‘proper’ slow press juicer rather than a masticating juicer (see the first post, ‘To juice or not to juice‘).

In the real world, I’m sure most people would be happier to compromise and accept an occasional use handy product such as the VonShef at around £66 or a great little regular workhorse Kuvings Cold Press Juicer for around the £300 mark.

Get juicing people!

Some tips for you:

• Immerse carrots into cold water 30 mins before juicing in order to soften/moisten
• The slow juicer is slow – if you want good results, give it time to process the food through the auger. My girlfriend will only add more into the machine when she sees that not much more pulp is coming out. If you feed in food too fast, you’ll notice that the pulp is wet; i.e. you’re not extracting as much juice as you could
• It’s good to mix up the soft and hard products (i.e. carrots and apples) bit by bit when feeding into the juicer – the harder carrots will then push out the soft pulp from the apple left overs
• If you do regularly juicing, invest in a composter bin – make use of all that pulp leftover
• You can also use the almost dry pulp leftovers to make your own home made flavoured vinegars (may post later on that!)