Counting the slice of lime in your G&T as one of your five a day may have got you through the festive season, but it can’t beat the refreshing goodness you’ll get from a freshly squeezed glass of juice this New Year. As we roll into 2020, now’s a great time to invest in an ergonomic juicing gadget to conjure up healthy drinks and more.
The latest juicer appliances come with the promise to retain the nutrients in fruit and vegetables and make the task of juicing simple and mess free. But with such a vast choice on offer online, it can be tricky to know which one will suit you best. To make buying the best juicer easier, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite designs for 2020, put them through their paces and ranked them in preference. We’ve also included buying advice on what to look for when choosing your design, so you can shop with peace of mind.
With clever attachments and easy-to-clean parts, the latest countertop juicing appliances have been designed with convenience in mind. When choosing a juicier that is right for your household, think about what you want from your design. Look online and you’ll find slow juicers on the market priced at pocket money prices to premium appliances worth hundreds, but pricier models aren’t always the best option. If you have a lot of family members to consider, it’s worth looking for a design with large capacity pulp and juice jugs, for example.
The most versatile and advanced machines include handy extras that give you the option to blitz up nut milks, baby foods and soups as well as create straight fruit and vegetable juices. If space is tight on your worktop however, you may want to choose a compact design that has a sole focus on juicing fruit and vegetables, as opposed to an all-singing design that blends and processes too.
You’ll find a range of juicer types online. If you’re looking to juice oranges and lemons, a citrus unit that extracts the juice from halved fruits will serve you well. But in our round up we have focused on juicers that work with all types of fruit and vegetables from blackberries to beetroots.
A popular type of fruit and vegetable juicer is the ‘centrifugal juicer’, which uses a rapidly spinning strainer and flat cutting blade to force out the juice. Centrifugal designs tend to be the cheapest and fastest option and work well with fruits such as apples and pears. As they work fast to shred ingredients they won’t work so well with softer fruits such as berries or greens such as wheatgrass. Another option is the ‘slow juicer’, which is a type of vertical masticating juicer that chews and grinds the fibres of its ingredients and puts pressure on the juice and pulp to extract liquid through its filter. Cold press and standard masticating juicers also work in this way, designed to retain more nutrients than fast and unforgiving centrifugal designs. You’ll find that slow juicers work best with leafy green vegetables such as wheatgrass and softer fruits such as berries, which centrifugal juicers find hard to tackle.
We've listed our testing methodology at the bottom of this post – but if you just want to race through our best juicer choices… read on!
We’ve ranked the Sana EUJ-707 juicer by Omega as the most capable juicer in our round up due to its unique, efficient and versatile design. With a variety of tools for performing much more than creating a simple juice, we think the Sana EUJ-707 juicer by Omega is great value for money. As well as juicing, the horizontal design comes with useful attachments for tasks such as grinding coffee beans, making fresh spaghetti, nut butters and baby food.
While preparing a green juice, we found it to be the most effective when tackling leafy greens such as kale and spinach, trickling out far more juice from these ingredients compared to the other designs in our test. The design comes with both a coarse strainer and fine strainer and the one you use really does make a difference to the results – while using the fine strainer on an apple for example, we found the drum and tubes got rather foamy, so its advisable to stick to the coarse strainer for harder fruits.
You will need a little patience to use this model – it can’t take on a whole apple, for example, and you’ll need to chop the fruit before inserting – after 30 seconds it was still chewing the apple. When tackling the celery the machine started to squeak a little too, but the amount of juice yielded was impressive. It doesn’t get too noisy either, reaching a reasonable 81 decibels in our broccoli floret test. While there are no dishwasher safe parts, its dedicated cleaning brush teamed with a little warm soapy water works well to clean the parts after use.
With its eye-catching stainless steel body with light-up operation dial, the Beko Slow Juicer SJA3209BX is enticing in design. Its 60rpm turning speed that claims to retain 80% more vitamins and 15 % more juice than standard models, works at a steady pace to gently crush ingredients. Its large feeding chute can take a whole apple – albeit a rather small one.
While making a green juice we found that each ingredient produced an impressive amount of liquid. The 1200ml pulp and juice containers are a decent size, so you won’t need to stop and empty them too frequently either.
In our test, we found this design worked best when we had chopped up ingredients as small as possible as we found fruits and vegetables were getting stuck in the feeding chute and cylinder chamber. To help dislodge ingredients there is a reverse dial, although we found ourselves having to manually take out a fibrous stick of celery to chop it up before juicing it again.
The juicer took around 20 seconds to blitz half an apple, and noise levels reached a bearable 87 decibels when juicing a floret of broccoli. This is average compared to a quieter 80 decibels for the Kuvings model and a more piercing 91 decibels for the Sage design.
Washing up was straightforward enough and with a little running hot water and coaxing with the pointy end of the cleaning brush we were able to dislodge pulp easily, then sit back and enjoy the results.
Unlike the other juicers in our round up, the Sage 3X Bluicer Pro doubles up as a blender. On first look, its informative LED control panel display stands out. This navigates you through the controls and lets you adjust the speed, which is a feature we think is lacking on standard juicer appliances.
In our round up of best juicers, we found the Sage to be the noisiest design, gearing up to a hefty 91 decibels when juicing a floret of broccoli. It came up top in terms of speed however, juicing an apple in just 10 seconds. Inside the box you’ll find an instruction manual and Juicing Speed Selection Guide, and this came in very helpful when we were trying to work out which speed to juice certain foods. A grapefruit for example is classed as a soft fruit and needs to be on a slow and steady level 1, while a carrot will need ramping up to fast and furious level 10.
The Kuvings Cold Press Juicer is available in six stylish colors including Champagne Gold, Gunmetal, Red and Black. It comes with a comprehensive recipe book for drinks such as Red Vitamin Radish Juice, which features radishes, tomatoes, carrots and lemons. There’s also a Tomato Soup that includes pulp from juiced potatoes, cabbage, onion, carrot and tomato.
The Kuvings Cold Press Juicer doesn’t come cheap, but with its relatively heavy base and stylish body you can tell you’re paying for a durable, serious piece of kit. While making a green juice, we were impressed at how well the machine tackled the ingredients and in particular how quickly it juiced drier ingredients such as the broccoli and spinach.
The machine can handle a whole apple and was the quietest machine in our test – reaching a mere 80 decibels when chewing a floret of broccoli. It took 26 seconds to juice half an apple, efficiently chewing the skin and producing a decent amount of juice. Meanwhile, it took around 20 seconds to devour a stick of celery, which did need to be prodded a few times with the pusher. Safety wise the machine won’t start unless the red dots are aligned correctly and the feeding chute is rather tall so hands can’t go near the drum. The froth on the green juice we produced was noticeably thicker on this design compared to others in our test, but this was easily separated when we poured the juice into a cup.
The attractive retro body on the Smeg SJF01 Slow Juicer certainly looks good on the worktop, but its basic functions are a little less luxurious. Designed to match Smeg’s iconic range of 1950s small and large appliances, this juicer comes with all the basics including a fine and coarse strainer, a juice jug with lid, a pulp container and two cleaning brushes.
In our test it did well to juice the celery, which could be easily inserted into the chute once chopped and coaxed down with the pusher and took just 10 seconds to turn into a clear green juice. Sound ramped up to 89 decibels when juicing the broccoli floret so it was one the noisier designs in our test, but the juice came out surprisingly smooth, with minimal froth on top.
Like many of the designs in our test, the Smeg will only work when slotted into place correctly. We did however, find ourselves having to hold onto the pusher when juicing harder fruits to prevent the juicer body from shaking on the worktop.
How we tested
Here we’ve rated each juicer in our test in order of preference, highlighting their USPs as well as their least desirable assets.
To ensure a fair test in our round up of the Best Juicers for 2020, we used each juicer to perform specific tasks while creating a delicious green juice using broccoli, ginger, celery, parsley, spinach, apple, pear and a slice of lime. To test how well the machines worked with hard produce, we tried juicing a 20cm stick of celery and noted the outcome.
We also timed how long it took on average for each gadget to juice half a Gala apple and, where possible, we assessed how well the juicer blitzed a whole apple. To find out how noisy the machines can get, we used the Decibel Meter app to record the sound level while each design juiced a floret of broccoli.
We have rated each design on its ease of use, simplicity in cleaning, speed, price, safety features, versatility and overall ergonomics.
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