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April 28, 2016
Making the Cut
The Science of the Chop in Each Juicero Pack
You don’t have to be a James Beard award-winning chef or have a few Michelin Stars up your sleeve to know that the way you slice your ingredients matters. Dice, julienne, rough chop, fine chop, chiffonade… it doesn’t really matter what you call it or whether you know the technical term for it. You probably know instinctively to cut things alike so they cook at similar rates or look a certain way.
Similarly in juicing circles, we know that we need to cut our produce in a particular way to optimize juice yield and make the best juice we can possibly make. By cutting our produce, it readies it for pressing. But how, exactly? Well, there’s a strategy to the chop that takes more than mere instinct. It’s a science.
Cutting to the Chase
Probably the single most important requirement for size reducing your produce is a razor sharp knife. At Juicero, we use the sharpest blades possible to minimize damage to cells and reduce the loss of fluids.
Along with a sharp knife, size and shape matter a lot. Roughly speaking, we’ve determined these three rough guidelines for cutting up roots, leafy greens and citrus:
- Roots have cells with strong cell walls, so they’re shredded or julienned since the tissues are strong enough to withstand a finer chop without losing juice
- Leafy greens have specialized cells with high chloroplast density, so they’re chopped to keep the integrity of the cells intact
- Fruits, like citrus, have large cells full of cytoplasm that can be easily released, so they’re diced to hold the structure
Inside the Pack, these pieces of produce continue to live and breathe, and the chop is designed so that everything remains as intact as possible.
That is until it all meets 4 tons of force…
What Happens in the Press?
When you put a Juicero Pack in the Press and start to make juice, the fresh-cut produce inside is progressively subjected to a thoughtfully engineered pressing profile. This forces the plant tissues to move in relation to each other, which creates extensive cell disruption. During pressing, this happens in the most ideal way to extract just the right amount of juice and flavor from the cells of each fruit and vegetable. Too much force, and it could lead to the juicing of bitter compounds that could affect the flavor negatively. Not enough force, and the juice isn’t fully extracted, which wastes perfectly good produce.
In our case, the nicely controlled system of applied pressure on the Pack from the Juicero Press coupled with gravity forces juice nutrients and water to move from the cellular vacuoles, chloroplasts and cytoplasm through the membranes, outside the cell wall and into your glass.
No cutting, dicing or chopping is required by you. Just drinking.