How to make your best fresh juice

Looking for an easy way to add more fruits and vegetables to your diet every day? If so, it's time to add a juicer to your arsenal of small appliances (or pull out the one that's hiding in the back of your cupboard).

Making your own juice is not only a great way to use up the abundance of fresh produce available during the summer months, it's also good for you.

Why you should make your own juice
"Homemade juice is high in vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and enzymes. It also has soluble fibre," explains Cherie Calbom, a.k.a. The Juice Lady, who is the author of The Juice Lady's Guide to Juicing for Health (Avery, 2008). Making juice yourself rather than buying it, packaged, helps you to ensure quality control since you're the one who's in charge of what exactly goes into your drink.

According to Calbom, the best fruits and vegetables for juicing include:
-carrots
-cucumbers
-kale
-beets with their tops intact
-lemons and;
-apples

Juicer buying tips
There are many juicers on the market, but there are some features you shouldn't skimp on. "Look for a strong motor," Calbom says. "Also, for fast juicing, a wide mouth is nice."

She also recommends a model that ejects the pulp rather than keeping it inside. And when that pulp comes out, it should be fairly dry. "If you're squeezing juice out of the pulp, your juicer is not efficient and you're wasting produce." But most important, she says, choose a juicer with only a few parts to wash, "or you won't use it."

While a blender may seem like a good enough substitute, Calbom knows people who've tried that but their attempts delivered unhappy outcomes. "They were in the kitchen for a long time, made a big mess, wasted a lot of produce and didn't even like the end product."

Click to continue to learn how to make the best homemade juice...

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How to make the best homemade juice
Start with fresh, ripe ingredients for optimal nutrients, says Calbom. If your produce isn't quite ripe, it won't yield as many health benefits and if it's too ripe you risk the chance of it being moldy or spoiled.

And those pesky seeds in some fruits and veggies are no problem when it comes to juicing. "There's no need to remove seeds," says Calbom. "They juice up well and have nutrients."

And it's the same deal for the skins. Calbom recommends giving your produce a good scrub before popping it in the juicer, but you don't have to pull out a peeler. Most citrus fruits should be peeled, but lemons and limes can go in with their skins on. And depending on how big the mouth of your juicer is, you hardly even have to clean up a cutting board. "The wide-mouth juicers require very little chopping."