Meet my new baby. I have a Champion juicer, but it doesn’t juice greens, and ever since I read Natalia Rose‘s book, The Raw Food Detox Diet: The Five-Step Plan for Vibrant Health and Maximum Weight Loss, I’ve wanted a juicer that can juice greens effectively. So I’m selling the Champion, and the Breville has been living in my kitchen for about 24 hours.

In that period I’ve juiced kale, romaine, oranges, lemons (whole!), apples, cabbage, and ginger, and the Breville eats it all up. Out comes this delicious, pure, colorful juice that I can’t seem to get enough of. Natalia’s book has you drinking this “Green Lemonade”, which consists of an entire head of romaine lettuce, a few leaves of kale, a whole lemon, 2 apples, and some ginger. If you’d told me ten years ago I’d be drinking this stuff, I’d have laughed so hard I’d get tears in my eyes, but HERE I AM.

Natalia’s book is about detoxing, learning to eat “fast exit” foods that leave you clean and sparkly, and cleaning out all the junk in your cells. I know at least one person who reads this blog is getting hives at the mere mention of “toxins”, but the more I read about all this and the more I see and feel what happens with regular massage, the more I believe there’s something to this idea.

I should just state for the record right now that while I am not going raw yet, I would love to see if I could someday, even for just short periods. I love raw foods, and the raw food movement. While, like Natalia, I don’t think that everyone in the world should necessarily go raw, I do think that an infusion of fresh veggies and fruits and juices in our collective American diet would be a huge boon to our health.

Breville Review:

So far, this thing is incredible. First of all, it’s just plain GORGEOUS, sitting out on the counter. My Champion looks like some kind of torture device, but the Breville looks like a sculpture. It gleams and glistens in the morning light. It BECKONS you to come have some juice. The feed tube on top, where you stick all your food in, is huge. I can drop whole apples or oranges in there if they’re small, and if they’re large they only take one cut to make it, which explains while every third sentence in the manual is DON’T PUT HANDS IN FEED TUBE. There are some things that shouldn’t be juiced, your fist being one of them.

The amount of juice it makes is amazing, way way way more than the Champion. I got almost twelve ounces of deep green juice from a single head of romaine lettuce. The Green Lemonade recipe yielded a surprising 40 oz of juice, which Sonja and I drank together. Beth even had a little and liked it. The clean-up was easy too; the entire top portion of the juicer comes apart in three easy pieces, leaving a very easy-to-wipe base. I rinsed the pieces and put them out to try on our dishrack, and that was that. Easy peasy.

The pulp is moist but not wet, and there are recipes for it in the juicer manual, including carrot cake and meat loaf, which cracked me up (because after all this fresh juice, the first thing I want is a big baked loaf of ground beef or a pile of cake)/ I’ve been putting my pulp in the worm bin, and I’m pretty sure they like it. I expect tiny slimy little thank-you notes any day now. Worms are supposed to hide when the light hits them, but I’m pretty sure mine are being trained to wiggle to the top like pet dogs and beg for scraps.

So far: A+++ WOULD JUICE AGAIN. I can’t wait to see how I feel after a few weeks on raw juices.