Looking After or Maintaining Your Cold Press Juicer

Maintaining your cold press or masticating juicer for long machine life and top performance. I cover cleaning tips and general maintenance for keeping your juicer in tip top condition. The modern cold press juicer really is a technical marvel of precise components working in harmony to give us a machine that does a brilliant job on the most variable of all the elements, the produce we try to juice. Imagine designing a machine that does a good job juicing a cucumber and an equally good job juicing a root vegetable like ginger. Juicers have evolved over the last few years to give us very versatile satisfying machines to use. These machines do however need cleaning and maintaining to keep them looking good and performing as if they were new. So let me cover cleaning your juicer first. Once you have owned and used your juicer for a few months you will learn pretty quickly that there is nothing a sticky and staining as the mineral rich residue left behind when juicing root vegetables and leafy greens. I think the main culprits for juicer staining are carrots and beetroot, for two reasons, carrots are very popular as a juicing staple and beetroot is a deep, deep red that will stain and adhere to anything it comes into contact with. Our recommendation to clean stained juicer components is this, remove all silicone rubber wiper blades, seals and bungs then soak the components in a solution of hot tap water and two table spoons of bicarbonate of soda per litre of water. Leave the components to soak overnight then scrub the juicer parts with a stiff washing up brush, try to buy a brush with bristles that are at all angles or come from the head of the brush to cover at least 90 degrees of the brush. This will help lift the staining from all the nooks and crannies of the juicer. I also use cotton buds or Q tips to clean tighter areas of the juicer where the brush will not reach. Most modern cold press juicers use a plastic reinforced stainless steel perforated juicing screen, this is the part that really does the hard work as the produce is pressed against it by the rotating auger. The juicing screen will get stained, have mineral deposits build in the perforations and have fibres get stuck in the perforations as well. Mostly juicer components CANNOT go in the dishwasher as the heat of a dishwasher will lead to fatigue and component failure. I tackle deep cleaning of the juicing screen by gently scrubbing the component with a suede brush inside and out again in a solution of bicarbonate of soda. The yellow metal bristles of the suede brush penetrate the perforations and lift out deposits and fibres and leave the juicing screen as good as new. Also if you juice a lot of carrots you’ll notice that the stainless steel takes on a yellow hue, this is normal, and reversible with the cleaning method detailed above.