Other juicers we tested
Breville Juice Fountain Plus
Breville’s Juice Fountain Plus is the best centrifugal juicer we’ve tested. It’s sturdy, straightforward, and powerful. We assembled it with ease, and though it isn’t compact, the machine is constructed to fit on a counter without taking up a ton of space. In the centrifugal juicer category, we found this model to be a standout, especially at the price point. One excellent feature is the three-inch wide feed chute (that’s a wide mouth, comparatively) to push whole apples or citrus fruits through, so unlike other models, you don’t have to cut your fruits and veggies into tiny pieces before adding them to the juicer (but you should peel them). Also, while most of the other juicers we tested had Forward and Reverse buttons on their power switches, the Breville had High and Low settings, which meant we could be specific about the power needed to juice leafy greens, soft fruits (low), and denser root vegetables (high). But it’s still a centrifugal juicers, and this style just doesn’t compare to a masticating juicer.
Ninja NeverClog Cold Press Juicer
For beginners testing the juicing waters and not ready to commit to a more expensive machine, the Ninja Never Clog Cold Press Juicer is a great deal for great, easy-to-make juice. And until we tested the Shine Multi-Batch Compact Cold Press Juicer, this stainless steel juicer from Ninja was our budget pick. Compared to our top picks, this is more of a classic “feeding tube” juicer design, which means you’ll need to trim down your produce into relatively small pieces and add them to the machine in stages as it processes them, using the tamper to force them down. And at less than 2 inches in diameter, the feeding tube is quite narrow. Part of the testing involved weighing out the juice yield against the solids; the Ninja’s pulp discard was slightly heavier (wetter) than what other models produced, which means that the juice yield is less. But even if there was a slight quantity issue, the quality of the juice was better than models with a higher yield. Unlike those machines the Ninja didn’t produce juice that was as foamy or that separated. We also found that while the machine runs quietly, some fresh fruits like grapes created some squeaking as they were being processed.
Breville Juice Fountain XL Pro
Like the standard Breville Juice Fountain, the XL is incredibly fast and powerful, blitzing through produce with alarming force and speed. It’s also relatively easy to clean for a centrifugal juicer, with the sharp blade requiring a quick rinse rather than a scrub, and snaps together quite quickly. We did find that larger chunks of vegetables passed through into the pulp container. But if speed and yield is at the top of your criteria, this is a contender. The only real difference between the standard Breville Juice Fountain and the Breville Juice Fountain XL are size. The XL has a whopping 70-oz max capacity (!), but with that large juicing capacity means it takes up way more counterspace. Unless you are serving an entire family’s worth of orange juice in the morning it didn’t seem as practical as the regular Juice Fountain, but if you do have a large household or other large scale juicing needs this is a great pick.
Hurom H200 Easy Clean Slow Juicer
The Hurom H200 Easy Clean Slow Juicer assembled in minutes and had a large hopper capable of fitting whole fruits (and a lot of other ingredients). It also worked quietly and produced very little pulp, meaning more actual juice. But while cleanup was a breeze, the machine had trouble processing fibrous ingredients like kale and ginger, and didn’t successfully juice a half lemon in our testing.
Hurom H310 Easy Clean Slow Juicer
The Hurom H310 Easy Clean Slow Juicer is one of the company’s newer models and works well while taking up very little counter space. It produces juice with almost no foam, and its six pieces come apart and clean up easily. The design flaw of this juicer is in its hopper, which must be opened in order to add ingredients during juicing. Opening the hopper stops the internal mechanism mid-mastication, which, when restarted, can jam. The H310 had trouble with some of the more fibrous ingredients like kale, but if you’re willing to put in the extra prep time to break down some of the ingredients into smaller, more manageable pieces, it will work well as a personal juicer.
Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Juicer
The Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Juicer has a lot of positive Amazon reviews, thanks in large part to its low price. Many of them cite it as a good “starter” juicer, to test the waters before investing in a more expensive model. But we found this model had the highest foam to juice ratio of any we tested, and the juices were murky and separated.
Nutribullet Slow Juicer
The Nutribullet Slow Juicer is surprisingly powerful, conquering everything from leafy greens to an entire half lemon, which gave other, more expensive slow juicers trouble. It also works noticeably faster than other juicers in its category, but that speed and power also brought more noise, as well. It produced juice with quite a bit of foam (likely also related to its speed), and although it didn’t expel much pulp, there was quite a bit of partially masticated fruit pulp inside when we opened it up to begin cleaning. Disassembly was challenging and required quite a bit of yanking.
Breville Juice Fountain Cold
The Breville Juice Fountain Cold is slightly bigger and more expensive than the Juice Fountain Plus. It was easy to assemble and featured a big mouth chute, so we didn’t have to do any advance prep to our produce before juicing. But we found it slightly harder to clean than the other Breville models, with many ginger fibers stuck in the metal mesh basket, plus it was the loudest of any machine we tried.
Breville Juice Fountain Compact
The Breville Juice Fountain Compact was not as impressive as we’d hoped—the design eliminates the pulp cup, making the lid the receptacle for all the pulp. This made it more tedious to clean and didn’t actually save meaningful counter space (the machine is still bulky; the detachable pulp cup is the only component that makes it slightly smaller than the Juice Fountain Plus).
Kuvings Whole Slow Juicer Elite
The Kuvings Whole Slow Juicer Elite is a very good juicer, but also a very expensive one. It’s heavy but has a slim profile and assembles quickly with the help of a “red dot locking system.” Plus, there are a few extra parts, like a blank strainer for making ice cream and frozen fruit sorbet, a hopper attachment for catching smaller items, and several cleaning tools. The extra-wide feeder chute was a bonus, but the pulp spout was more difficult to wash than other slow juicers. We also found that the juice was a bit grittier, with more bits of pulp than many of the others we tested, even at much lower price points.
Cuisinart Juice Extractor
The Cuisinart Juice Extractor is a centrifugal model with five speed settings, nicely locking parts, and a large juice jug with a handle, lid, and spout. We liked that it felt powerful, but manageable and that it didn’t whir so fast it seemed like it might fly off the counter (a concern with a few other models). But the motor was so jumpy that smaller and lighter pieces of produce, like grapes and blueberries, bounced up and out of the chute when added. As centrifugal machines go this is a good one, but the Breville Juice Fountain Plus is better.
Cuisinart Easy Clean Slow Juicer
The Cuisinart Easy Clean Slow Juicer performs well, with a relatively small footprint, easy-to-clean and -assemble parts, and by making very good juice. Other reviewers have noted that it clogs easily with fibrous vegetables like kale and celery, which means that there’s more prep work required to get them into smaller pieces, to prevent clogging in both the hopper and the auger. But it’s still a great value if you’re looking for a slow juicer.
Hurom Easy Clean Juicer
The Hurom Easy Clean Juicer also came with a few additional pieces to justify the high price point, like an ice cream strainer and a smoothie strainer. But despite its name, we did not find it very easy to clean. In fact, the many crevices and crannies where pulp got stuck made washing this model feel like a real chore. Plus, the chute mouth is quite small, requiring a lot of prep work before you can begin to feed your produce into the machine. Hurom’s newer easy clean models are big improvements.
Hurom H-AA Slow Juicer
The Hurom H-AA Slow Juicer came with some impressive add-ons as well like an ice cream strainer and tofu press set, but the chute was too small to fit produce that wasn’t cut into tiny pieces and the foam yield was quite high.
Omega Vertical Slow Masticating Juicer
Some Omega juicer models are capable of making nut butters but this one—the Omega Vertical Slow Masticating Juicer—is not it. This was the only juicer that stopped working mid-testing due to produce backup. It was difficult to clean and not as intuitive to use as we would have wished—especially for the price.
Tribest Slowstar Juicer
The Tribest Slowstar Juicer gave an average performance. It was a little messy, with green and orange juice spattering onto the counter, and had a small chute that required a lot of effort on our part to fit kale and carrots.
AICook Juice Extractor
The AICook Juice Extractor arrived basically fully assembled, which made it easy to use right out of the box. But the instructions mention that it isn’t suitable for produce with cores, hard seeds, hard skins, or lots of fibers, which felt like a lot to give up. It’s quite inexpensive, but you pay for it when it comes time to clean; after noisy juicing, we spent a long time trying to get pieces of pulp unstuck from various crevices, with middling success.
“Amazon first” juicers
We also tested a number of the “best selling” and “top rated” juicers on Amazon which all looked mysteriously similar. We found they had design issues that made them hard to work with. Lots more details on why we recommend sticking to established brands in our review here.
Juice recipes we love
Put your new juicer machine to work with one of these fruit and vegetable juice recipes from the Epicurious archive. Or mix and match your favorite produce to develop a house flavor that you can make again and again.
+ There are no comments
Add yours