Cold-pressed juice is a convenient and enjoyable way to add a wider variety and greater quantity of fruit and vegetables to your diet. Beetroot, leafy greens, berries, citrus, celery, carrots, herbs and roots all bring different combinations of vitamins, minerals and plant compounds to the glass.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to make cold-pressed juice at home, look at some of the more interesting evidence around juice and health, suggest three simple heart-conscious juice blends, and explain how to make fresh juicing an easy and enjoyable daily routine.
How to Make Cold-Pressed Juice at Home
Making cold-pressed juice is simple. Wash your fruit and vegetables, remove anything you would not normally eat such as thick citrus peel, and cut produce only as much as your juicer requires. Feed the ingredients through a cold press juicer, where an auger slowly crushes and presses the produce to separate the juice from the pulp.
For an everyday juice, vegetables such as cucumber, celery, leafy greens, carrot or beetroot make a good foundation. Add apple, orange, berries, lemon, ginger or other strongly flavoured ingredients to make something you actually look forward to drinking.
- Where practical, choose organic or spray-free produce to reduce pesticide exposure. This is particularly important on thin-skinned fruits.
- Wash your ingredients thoroughly.
- Peel thick citrus skins and remove unsuitable stones or hard pits.
- Cut produce only as much as your juicer requires.
- Feed ingredients steadily, alternating softer and firmer produce where useful.
- Stir and taste. Adjust the balance next time until you find combinations you love.
Cold pressing removes much of the insoluble fibre into the pulp, but retains vitamins, minerals, polyphenols, carotenoids and other compounds naturally present in the produce. Different plants bring different chemistry to the glass, which is a good argument for variety.
Juice, Nutrition and Heart Health: What Does the Research Say?
Juice sometimes gets reduced to a rather simplistic argument: whole vegetables and fruit contain fibre, juice contains less fibre, therefore juice must be nutritionally inferior and best avoided. The reality is more interesting.
Juicing does remove much of the insoluble fibre, so it makes sense to keep eating whole plant foods as well. But juice also makes it remarkably easy to consume the liquid and soluble components of a large amount and variety of fresh produce. A glass containing beetroot, carrot, celery, cucumber, ginger and leafy greens may represent considerably more raw produce than most people would sit down and eat at once.
Research on 100% fruit and vegetable juices has found potentially useful effects on areas including blood pressure, vascular function and markers of inflammation and oxidative stress.
There is particularly interesting evidence around beetroot juice. Beetroot and leafy greens contain dietary nitrates, which the body can convert into nitric oxide. Nitric oxide helps blood vessels relax and plays an important role in normal circulation. Clinical studies of beetroot juice have repeatedly found reductions in systolic blood pressure, although the size of the effect varies and beetroot juice is certainly not a substitute for medical treatment.
The wide range of fruits and vegetables offer different nutritional benefits: for example, anthocyanins in berries, flavanones in citrus, carotenoids in carrots, polyphenols in pomegranate, and the enormous range of plant compounds that don’t fit neatly onto a vitamin label. Nutrition is not a fully understood or quantifiable formula.
One way to approach this: juice a variety of colours.
Why Cold Press — and What Should You Juice?
Cold press juicers use a slow-moving auger to crush and press produce rather than the rapidly spinning cutting disc used in a centrifugal juicer. This produces a different style of extraction, with relatively little heat or aeration, and works particularly well with vegetables, leafy greens and fibrous produce.
All fruits and vegetables are candidates but some ingredients are classic:
- Beetroot: earthy, colourful and naturally rich in dietary nitrates. Excellent with carrot, apple, citrus and ginger.
- Leafy greens: spinach, kale and similar greens bring folate, potassium, magnesium, carotenoids and other plant compounds. Cucumber, celery, apple or lemon soften their stronger flavour.
- Celery and cucumber: excellent high-water foundations for a vegetable juice and useful for diluting stronger ingredients without adding much sweetness.
- Carrots: naturally sweet and rich in beta-carotene, which the body can convert to vitamin A. They also provide carotenoids and other plant compounds, and their mild sweetness makes them one of the most useful ingredients for balancing stronger flavours such as beetroot, leafy greens, ginger and turmeric.
- Berries: blueberries, strawberries and raspberries contain anthocyanins and other polyphenols and add colour, acidity and sweetness.
- Citrus: oranges, lemons, limes and grapefruit provide vitamin C, flavanones and brightness. Remove thick peel before juicing.
- Pomegranate: intensely flavoured, colourful and rich in polyphenols. Juice the seeds rather than the outer skin.
- Ginger and turmeric: a little goes a long way. Both add considerable flavour and contain plant compounds that continue to attract scientific interest.
Don’t feel obliged to follow recipes precisely. One of the pleasures of owning a juicer is finding that a single cucumber, half a beetroot, two carrots, a handful of greens and your last lemon become something unexpectedly good.
Three Cold-Pressed Juice Recipes to Start
Sunrise Beet Blend
- 1 medium beetroot
- 2 large carrots
- 1 apple
- 1 handful spinach
- 1 small knob ginger
Earthy and slightly sweet, with beetroot providing the colour and ginger giving it some bite. Wash the produce, cut only as required by your juicer and juice everything together.
Citrus Berry Juice
- 1 cup strawberries
- 1 orange, peeled
- ½ grapefruit, peeled
- ½ cup blueberries
- 1 small cucumber
A lighter, fruitier juice combining berries and citrus with cucumber. For something less sweet, increase the cucumber or add celery and reduce the fruit.
Golden Carrot Juice
- 2 large carrots
- 1 apple
- 1 small piece fresh turmeric
- ½ lemon, peeled
- Small piece fresh ginger, optional
Carrot and apple provide the body and sweetness while turmeric, lemon and ginger make this considerably more interesting than straight carrot juice.
For more combinations, explore our juicer recipes and our green juice recipes and guide.
Juice for Pleasure, Not Reward
The best juice isn’t necessarily the theoretically perfect recipe. It’s the one you enjoy enough to keep making.
If vegetable juice initially tastes like something produced while mowing the lawn, don’t suffer heroically. Add some apple, pineapple, orange or lemon. Cucumber and carrot can soften stronger greens. Ginger can transform a dull juice. As your palate changes, you may find yourself naturally reducing the sweeter ingredients.
There is also no ideal juicing timetable. Some people juice every morning; others make juice several times a week. Fresh is ideal, but juice can also be refrigerated promptly in a clean, well-sealed container when you want to make it ahead.
A few practical habits make an enormous difference:
- Keep a selection of good juicing vegetables in the fridge rather than shopping for a complicated recipe every time.
- Use fruit for flavour and balance rather than automatically making it the bulk of every juice.
- Eat whole plant food as well. The whole vegetable and its fibre has its place.
- Rinse the juicer immediately. Dried pulp turns a 60-second job into archaeology.
Choosing a Cold Press Juicer
If you’re going to juice regularly, convenience matters. A machine that extracts well but takes forever to assemble or clean has an excellent chance of eventually becoming a kitchen ornament.
Torus offers two quite different approaches:
- Torus Solo Gen2 — a horizontal cold press juicer particularly well suited to celery, leafy greens, wheatgrass and other fibrous produce. Its direct-flow design is also exceptionally quick to clean.
- Torus Mouth — a vertical auto-feed juicer with a large 145 mm hopper, designed for loading a mixture of fruit and vegetables and letting the machine do more of the feeding for you.
If you’re deciding between juicing technologies, see our guide to cold press vs centrifugal juicers. If celery and leafy greens are your priority, our celery juicing guide goes into considerably more detail.