How to Make Green Juice (Steps, Ingredients and Optional Extras!)
In recent years, juicing has transformed from an exclusive trend in the community for healthy living, to an obsession with natural fitness and nutrition. These days, you’re bound to find countless articles on juice cleanses, and detoxes, while juicer sales continue to skyrocket across the country.
However, if you think that you already know everything there is to learn about juicing, then you might need to think again. Talk to any juicing enthusiast today, and you’ll come across plenty of terms like cold-pressing, pasteurization, and live enzymes that could place you in a whole new world of beverage confusion. Fortunately, in this article, we’re going to cover the basics on how to make green juice at home – so you can access all the healthy benefits of vegetables in your own kitchen!
Article Summary
The Benefits of Green Juice
Before we begin exploring how to make green juice at home, let’s draw some attention to the benefits of drinking green juice on a regular basis. Green juices are a fantastic way to get your recommended servings of fresh produce – particularly when you don’t enjoy eating huge salads and vegetable medleys on a regular basis.
Most green juices not only help you to lose weight, but also pack in plenty of vitamins and nutrients if you’ve missed your five a day. Green juice can even help to improve cholesterol too, and one small study gave 32 men with high cholesterol levels a little under a single cup of kale juice each day for three months, just to find that for non-smokers, the HDL to LDL ratio had improved by 52%!
Creating a Base for Green Juice
The first step in figuring out how to make green juice, is deciding what kind of base you want. Green juices don’t require you to use green vegetables exclusively, and it’s worth noting that you can also use a range of other colored fruits and vegetables – though typically in smaller amounts. Here are just a few suggestions for your green juice base:
- Apple and Carrot: Apples and carrots blend together perfectly – though you might not pair them naturally during your meals and lunches. 2 apples mixed with a single carrot gives you a sweet and refreshing juice that’s very easy for beginners who are trying to make the transition into green-juice living.
- Cucumber and celery: This is more of a potent green juice base, dense in nutrients and perfect for supplying electrolytes and sodium to your body. If you work out a lot, this can be a great juice for helping you to generate extra energy and rejuvenate after exercise.
- Green apples and a lemon: If you want to make a green juice that’s as fruity as possible, the lemon in this mix will help to boost your weight loss, and add some zing to your drink.
Adding the Main Ingredients
Once your base is out of the way, you’ll be ready to add the main ingredients to your juice. These will give you the largest dose of vitamins, and should help to add additional flavor to the mix. If you’re new to green juicing, then it may be a good idea to stay away from anything with too much of a strong taste. Kale and celery are often the best choices for beginners, but some other combinations to try might include:
- Celery and cabbage
- Broccoli and cabbage
- Capsicum and Brussel sprouts
- Collard greens and spinach
- Pumpkin and bitter gourd
- Asparagus and lettuce
- Beetroot and lemon
- Tomato and Grapefruit
- Carrots and sweet potato
- Apple and fennel
Remember to mix and match different items per your preferred tastes, and try adding a little more or less of a certain ingredient depending on how your juice turns out. Most people find that the perfect juice is a very personal thing. In other words, it might take a lot of experimenting before you find your nutritional prince.
How to Make Green Juice: The Optional Extras
Once you’ve blended your base and your main ingredients together, you’ll be ready to add any optional extras that might appeal to you in terms of taste or specific nutritional value. For instance, if you didn’t use broccoli as a main ingredient, you might add a little at the end of your blend if you feel as though you need an extra dose of iron.
There are also plenty of extras that you can add small amounts of to help balance your intestinal flora or give you a substantial health boost. For instance:
- Cayenne powder for weight loss
- Garlic cloves for heart health
- Ginger root for the stomach
- Leeks for vitamin K and manganese
- Cilantro to improve sleep and lower blood sugar levels
You’re only limited by your imagination!
Creating your Perfect Green Juice
Hopefully, this guide has given you everything you need to learn how to make green juice at home, but remember that you can always keep trying new and exciting things. Recipes for green juice are appearing online every day, spiced by cinnamon and cayenne pepper, or enhanced by a dash of mint or lime. Now, you’re ready to take your first step on your juicing journey.
