Can You Make Fresh Juices With a Blender?

Can you make fresh juice with a blender?

Blending and juicing are two different things, but if you’re willing to take some extra steps after blending, you can make a beverage that resembles a juice. Our recommendation is always to use a cold press juicer to make the best quality juice, but…if all you have is a blender, read on.

If you’ve been wondering how to make juices with a blender, you’re in for a treat, because today I will walk you through how to make a simple apple juice using just a blender and a strainer. We will also cover the steps you’ll need to take to modify any juice recipe into a blender recipe for making fresh juice.

Why would you use a blender to make juice?

With 100+ recipes on our recipe blog, we get the question a lot, “Can I make this juice recipe using a blender?”  I am addressing this question by giving you everything you need to know about how to make fresh juices using just a blender and a strainer.

First, let’s talk about the two reasons why one might be using a blender instead of a juicer to make juice.

1. You don’t own a juicer and a blender is the only equipment you have on hand. Did you know you don’t need a special juice blender to make fresh juice? Yep, that’s right! Any blender will do. It’s the prep, squeezing, and filtering steps that take it from a smoothie to a juice-type beverage. It’s true that using a blender to make “juice” is nowhere near the same as using a cold press juicer, especially when it comes to the quality of the juice, but in a pinch, a blender will do. Any way that allows you to consume more fresh fruit and vegetables is a good thing! A blender processes fruits and vegetables similar to that of a centrifugal juicer, (but without the separation of pulp and juice part). If you want to learn more about the down side to using a blender/centrifugal juicer technology to make juice, you can read about that here: Types of Juicers
2. You don’t get enough fiber in your regular diet. If  you need all the fiber you can get to aid in digestion and help make eliminations “regular”, you may want to consume a smoothie instead of juice (blend the produce and do not strain it). Although it’s true that when you make juice, you discard the flesh of the produce which contains insoluble fiber, however, a third or more of the fiber is in the juice itself—in the form of soluble fiber. Whether or not a person needs the insoluble fiber contained in the plants depends on how much fiber said person is getting as part of their regular diet, and if they need the extra fiber to help with digestion. Most people do not need all the fiber they get from a smoothie.

You can read more about the differences between juice and smoothies in our article here: Juice vs Smoothies – The Debate is Over

How to make juice recipes with a blender

Follow the steps below to modify any juice recipe into a blender recipe for fresh juice.

1. Prep the produce. Because you will have to manually filter out the pulp after blending, you will want to remove as much of the insoluble fiber beforehand. Not to mention that these fibrous items (like seeds, skin, and stems) typically lend a bitter taste to juice anyway. This means coring apples, removing seeds, peeling skin and pith (that white part under the skin on citrus fruits), removing stems, and also cutting the produce down to a small size so it can blend easily.
2. Process in the blender. After prepping the ingredients, try blending everything together. If your blender is not powerful enough or it’s just not blending smoothly because it’s too thick, add some water.
3. Strain out the pulp. The final step is to strain out the pulp to reach the consistency of juice. Juice made on a juice press is clean, bright and smooth (which is pretty much impossible to achieve using a blender), and lasts a few days in the fridge. When you are blending or using a centrifugal juicer, you will want to consume it immediately, because the nutrients start to degrade right away using these juicer technologies.  You can strain the mixture using a strainer, nut milk bag, or cheese cloth.