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Fruit & Fibre
To make the most of seasonal gluts of produce you really need a juicer. The results, depending on what you put in of course, can be used fresh, frozen as juice, made into soups, nut butters, spreads, ice creams, sorbets etc. With so much interest in raw food, detox diets and healthy eating, you would think that European appliance manufacturers could manage to produce quality juice extractors, but sadly this seems not to be so. The only place to get a serious domestic machine is from the USA. The general build quality, ease of use and long warranty periods put local products to shame. The three US machines I selected to test are all acclaimed as the very best of their type.
Firstly let me explain the three different models. The L’Equip is a centrifugal machine and works by ripping apart the produce in a shallow toothed drum rotating at high speed. The juice falls through the drum and the pulp is thrown out. Crude but very effective. The Samson is a single auger masticating machine. This uses a slowly rotating worm drive to crush the produce through a sieve; slower but producing high quality results. The Green Star is a twin gear masticator, this crushes the produce between two toothed gearwheels before being sieved. It produces the highest quality results and claims to retain more minerals by the use of magnets in the gears.
The Samson and Green Star models can do many other tasks as well as juicing, such as making pasta, bread sticks, rice cakes, minced baby food, grinding coffee, etc., but testing was limited to just their juicing ability. These two will also juice greens and wheatgrass (not tested).
I tried all three machines at home separately and all together at the office in a head to head test. Produce juiced included carrots (hard vegetables), celery (stringy veg.), pineapple (high juice fruit), oranges and lemons (pithy fruit) and apples (firm, skinned fruit).
All three were simple to set up and operate, and overall performed well. There were, however, differences between them.
The L’Equip, has to be the star of the show. It juiced everything that was put into it, with a minimum of fuss and almost instantly. It produced the second highest amount of juice and had the neatest pulp collection system. My only criticism of it is that with pithy fruit like oranges some fragments end up in the juice unless the fruit is peeled. Apples juiced so fast, I would consider using it to juice large quantities instead of using a press. Clean up was the quickest, with the fewest pieces and easiest to clean. Competitively priced this has to be a star buy.
The Samson did very well with pine-apple which self-fed and produced a high yield. Carrots, on the other hand, needed ramming down, though again the yield was good. Apples needed cutting a bit smaller than for the other machines due to a narrower feed pipe. Overall it worked well, if slowly compared to L’Equip. The juice was of a high quality, but the quantity produced was slightly lower than the others. It cleaned up easily using the brush tool provided. This is a robust machine which will do many juicing and other tasks.
The Green Star is the highest specification machine and comes with a multitude of accessories. It performed faultlessly and produced noticeably better juice with no pithiness. The yield was the highest of all of the machines. It has the most parts to clean, isn’t the quickest and costs the most, but if you are serious about your juicing, I think it’s the one to have.
John Adams
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L'Equip 110.5 Juicer
Samson 6 in 1 Juicer
Green Star Juicer
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