As you might already know based on my most recent posts lately, my fiance purchased a Breville juicer at the beginning of January this year. Juicing was something I’ve never done any research on prior to getting the Breville and when it comes to topics related to health, I become obsessed, and that’s exactly what I did with the topic of juicing. During all of the research I did, I learned an important thing about juicers; that there are centrifugal and masticating juicers and they each work in very different ways.
Basically, a masticating juicer squeezes the juice out of a fruit or veggie, while a centrifugal juicer shreds the produce and spins the pulp away from the juice. After watching a bunch of videos and reading dozens of articles on the differences, the general consensus seems to be that masticating juicers are simply better at juicing. The key main benefits are that they get more juice and the yield is richer.
We didn’t want to get rid of the Breville because we actually like it a whole lot, but I really wanted to give a masticating juicer a try, so I started looking around for something affordable, which eventually led me to the manual HealthyJuicer from Lexen. Everything I could find about this machine was positive so I wanted to test it out, which gave me the idea of contacting the folks at Lexen and seeing if they would be willing to part with one of their awesome HealthyJuicers so that I could do a review. Much to my pleasure, they agreed!
Since the HealthyJuicer is designed as a wheatgrass juicer, and my Breville can’t do wheatgrass, I decided to pick up some wheatgrass from my local health food store. This is another topic I watched a lot of videos on and read plenty of articles about. Wheatgrass seems to be healthy, but I was more worried about the taste. Some of the videos I watched showed people complaining that the wheatgrass tasted like a freshly mown lawn. I wasn’t sure I would enjoy that taste.
So I set up the machine, which was really easy. Now, I could have it up and going in about 20 seconds.
Since the machine is designed for wheatgrass, that’s the first thing I ran through it. I was delighted to find out that wheatgrass juice tastes nothing like a lawn. I’ve heard that bad batches of wheatgrass might have a lawn taste, but good batches are supposed to taste sweet. Luckily, mine must have been a good batch, because it tasted sweet and it was really good. The only bad thing about wheatgrass is that it doesn’t contain much juice, so you sort of need a lot of it to get a good yield.
I liked it so much that I actually decided to buy a wheatgrass grow kit from Amazon to grow my own and to save a little money. That’s my first batch of wheatgrass in the picture below 😀
The HealthyJuicer is designed mostly for leafy greens, but I wanted to put it to the test. It passed with (mostly) flying colors. Since this juicer is manual, I was interested in how tough it would be to crank through some of the harder varieties of produce. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve made lots of juices containing stuff like pears, spinach, apples, celery, kale, beets, apples and carrots.
Sometimes it gets tougher to turn on the hard veggies, for example when putting too many carrots in or when juicing a large kale stem, but it works it’s way through the machine quickly. It’s actually not much more difficult, but the handle seems like it might break if you put too much pressure on it. I’ve been grabbing the handle closer to the base when this happens. To be safe, I would recommend chopping up hard veggies into smaller pieces.
Considering that the manual HealthyJuicer is only $45, I would definitely recommend picking it up or giving them as gifts. I honestly can’t believe that it’s so affordable. To be fair, I haven’t tested any other wheatgrass juicers so I don’t know if the yields this one produces compares, but I can tell you that I’m happy with it. You can buy one from 877MyJuicer.com with free shipping and a 30-day return policy.