Fresh home-made juice and juicing

Freshly picked for juicing

Anyone who grows fruit and vegetables will know that at times there is a glut and the more you harvest the more the plants seem to produce. This situation at times is compounded when family, friends or neighbours arrive bearing fresh produce.

Here at La Pasera, we decided to purchase a juicer so that we could not only use up more of our home produce but also benefit from drinking home juices that incorporate in the main, freshly picked fruits, herbs and vegetables.

From a health viewpoint, when you decide to start juicing, you will benefit from all their micro-nutrients,  especially the vitamins that easily oxidise and get destroyed or which are radically depleted in cooking. Natural sugars start decreasing as soon as fruit and veg are picked or with long term storage, so using them in this way, the natural sweetness is much more prominent.

One of the disadvantages of juicing is the loss of fibre due to the removal of all the solids but this is a small price to pay when you consider not only the sweetness but also the taste you get when juicing home grown produce you collected from the plot a few minutes earlier.

The juice combinations you can make depend not only on the fruits and vegetables available but also on what you add to them in terms of spices and herbs. There is no reason why you cannot add spices and exotic or seasonally purchased fruits in your choice of juices.

 Only your imagination and personal taste is the limit to the range of juices you can make.

One of my favourite combinations include: beetroot and apple; celery, apple, lime and fennel; pineapple, celery and fennel with a touch of mint, and what about orange, ginger and apple. My latest one was windfall russet apples and Asturian wild peach, simply decadent and I will be making more tomorrow.