This is John Kohler with discountjuicers.com, today I have a very exciting episode for you,
what I’m going to do today is I’m going to juice a pineapple, and give you the play
by play and the step by step on how to properly juice it the Omega VRT330 HD juicer.
Now it’s very important when juicing in the Omega VRT330 to follow proper procedures
that actually aren’t outlined in the instruction manual.
If you haphazardly cut up the pineapple and just put it in without paying attention, the
juicer may back up on you, and actually this is the way it’s designed.
Actually the reason why it does that, let me go ahead and show you guys, the reason
why it does that is on the bottom of the machine there’s this little pulp flap, this little
silicone pulp flap, its job is to be the gatekeeper, or to keep the pulp inside the machine and
only let it out when the maximum juice has been extracted from the pulp.
Now the problem arises that with softer fruits, and things that are soft and mushy, it doesn’t
eject out properly.
Now with things like carrots, it has no problem and it works perfectly, but with fruits it
can have some challenges if you’re not following certain procedures.
Also, this also will get backed up with things that are stringy, so things like celery, kale
and collards that have long strings in the stalk, they also tend to get stuck up in here.
This one’s going to deal with juicing pineapples, and also I’ll share with you how to juice
some fruits properly in the VRT.
Let’s go ahead and push this little flap back in there.
And once again you always want to have the flap fully pushed in when juicing for best
results.
We’re going to go ahead and reassemble the machine, so we’re all set and ready to go.
Now the first thing that’s really important before even thinking about juicing fruits
is proper fruit selection, so what does that mean?
So when you go to the store, or go to your farmer’s market, or maybe go out to your
farm and pick your own fruits, you want to get a certain kind of fruit to juice.
Now if you are going to be eating the fruits, of course I recommend you get the fruits as
ripe as possible, and when fruits are ripe, generally that means they’re softer.
So if you do get soft fruits, they’re definitely good for eating, or blending in my opinion,
and in my opinion also, in general we shouldn’t probably be juicing fruits.
When we juice fruits we basically get a sugar water.
Now the sugar water’s definitely better than any Coca-Cola, Diet Coke or anything
else, any other beverage, or even better than canned and bottled fruit juices, but not as
good as vegetable juices.
So I would prefer and encourage you to eat your fruits whole or to blend them up, thereby
you get the fiber, and the fiber regulates the absorption of the sugar into our bloodstreams.
That being said, if you did want to juice them, it’s important and critical that you
get nice hard firm fruits, and generally firm fruits are maybe not as ripe as they could
be.
So firm fruits will always work better when juicing for example if you get some soft,
mushy apples that are starting to go bad, try to juice them, you’re going to make
more of an applesauce than an apple juice, and I do have other videos on YouTube demonstrating
how to juice at least a dozen kinds of different fruits in the Omega VRT and in many cases,
many fruits make instead of a nice clean juice, it’ll make more of a nectar, so a nice thicker,
richer, full-bodied textured juice.
While the VRT is in my opinion one of the best juicers to juice fruits, it still has
its limitations, and once again, the best juicer for juicing fruits is probably a press.
So if you really want a nice clean juice, and I actually have a video on that juicing
pineapples in the Welles press, check for my other videos on that, that makes the best
fruit juices every single time, so you want to get the Welles press if you want to juice
fruit juices, and make a lot of fruit juices and have it come out the best and the highest
yield.
Now the last, I like the Omega VRT juicer for its versatility, it tends to juice a lot
of things and does it actually fairly well, and it’s fairly convenient.
So besides getting hard and firm produce, in general if you’re juicing more than one
kind of produce item at a time, you want to rotate what you’re juicing.
So if you’re juicing apples in with your carrot juice, the juicer doesn’t tend to
have a problem, because the carrots help push in the apples and the hard fiber in the carrots
help push through the soft pulp of the apples, that’s really where the problem comes in,
is the juicer has a hard or challenging time dealing with the soft pulp.
Now you can look at the other different brands of juicers that may be a little bit more forgiving
when feeding fruits in the machine.
But in general, most juicers except for the Welles Press will have challenges when juicing
fruits.
So I guess the first thing to do that’s very important is to cut the produce properly.
So in the case of a pineapple, you can juice the pineapple skin, it is edible, and the
juicer can handle it no problem, the juicer can also handle many other skins of fruits.
That being said, because this is a conventional pineapple and not grown organically, there’s
probably actually fungicides and other things sprayed on here that I don’t want to be
eating, so I’m going to actually cut off the skin.
Now if you do juice the skin of fruits, it will tend to make your juice maybe not quite
as sweet and add more of a full-bodied flavor to it.
So actually water melon rind, actually one of my favorite things to juice, and there’s
actually a lot of chlorophyll in the water melon rind.
Actually the VRT does an amazing job at juicing water melon.
So next let’s go ahead and cut open this pineapple and show you the specific way that
I like to cut it open and then feed it into the machine, and I’ll give you that play
by play.
So the first thing I like to do is I like to just twist off the top, very simple very
easy, just twist and then than comes off, you could actually peel back some of these
leaves here and then actually plant this in some dirt in your house, keep it nice and
watered, not too moist, and this may actually shoot up into a plant and then actually make
you another pineapple.
Of course you need to grow this inside unless you live in maybe like tropical Florida or
Hawaii.
Move that aside.
The next thing I like to do is I like to take the pineapple and I like to cut off the bottom
and the top.
So we’re going to take the knife and just cut it down the top so I’ll remove the top
here.
And then I’ll also turn around, and I’m going to cut off the bottom.
So once we got that cut off, the next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to put
it on the cutting board, and then I like to put it on the edge of the cutting board, and
take my knife and just slice down to slice off the skin.
So I’ll slice off that skin, I’ll turn it a little bit, and I’ll go down and I’ll
continue to turn it and continuing to slice off a little bit of the skin at a time as
I’m rotating it around.
Now this ensures me that I actually get the most pineapple in my juice with the least
amount of skin and the least amount of waste.
Alright so we’re almost done peeling off all the skin off this pineapple, so now that
we have the pineapple skin, the next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to do
is, this is really important actually, if you just start cutting the pineapple up, you’re
probably going to cut it wrong.
What I like to do is once again the pineapple was oriented like this, the little top was
on the top, we’re just going to cut it right down the middle, and right in the middle of
the pineapple is that core, so if you’re actually eating the pineapple you probably
cut out that core, but the core is the essential part that you want and need to make sure that
your pineapple is juiced properly in the Omega VRT juicer.
So we’re going to cut right down the middle, right through the middle of that core – man
this is a juicy pineapple.
And you can see here, you can kind of see, you probably can’t see too much in the video,
but this is the core right in the middle.
And once we do that, then the next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to cut it once
again lengthwise, and we’re going to cut down the middle of the pineapple into pieces
that will fit into the machine.
And we’re going to do this to both halves.
Alright so now that I’ve got my pineapple cut, the main thing that I want you guys to
notice is that, this was a whole half here, let’s see if I can pick that up, this was
a whole half, and remember the core was in the middle.
So these outside pieces, these are non-core pieces.
These pieces don’t have the core, they’re nice and flexible and soft, and kind of mushy
actually.
The next piece here, let’s see you might have a little bit of core in there, but this
piece right here, this has a lot of core, and this core is a hard fiber that the Omega
VRT juicer needs to work properly.
So the main strategy here is we’re going to feed non-core pieces that don’t have
the hard fiber through the machine, and when we start seeing it back up a little bit, then
we’re going to want to feed a core piece, whether it’s a thick core piece right from
the middle, or if it’s one of the side core pieces that has a little bit of core.
We want to alternate and give soft produce and then pieces without the core, and then
pieces with the core to help push it through so that we can have a successful juicing session
with this pineapple without it having to back up on me.
Now if you want to see a video of it backing up, you should check my other videos, I have
a video where I actually talk about is it cheaper to buy pineapple juice or juice a
pineapple, and actually I wasn’t paying attention in that video, and actually it backs
up, so I explained how to deal with a backup situation in the VRT as well.
So today we’re going to try to do it right, so let’s turn the machine on and get juicing.
So the first thing of course we want to have a non-core piece that’s nice and soft run
down through the machine.
You can see we put that in, and instantly we’re getting some pineapple pulp out on
this side, and some juice on this side.
So because that is flowing pretty good, I feel confident in getting another non-core
piece from the other end, and we’re going to let that juice.
And once again that pulp is flowing out nice and fine as well.
Now be aware the pulp outlet port is that much, and that much pineapple is coming out.
As long as pineapple or something is moving out of your ejection port, it’s going to
be fine.
Next let’s go ahead and do another non-core piece and see how that works.
Once again that’s kicking out pulp really good, so I feel confident in putting another
non-core piece in.
Now we have been putting a whole bunch of softer fibers through, so it’s still kicking
it out pretty good, but I don’t want to take too many more chances, so we’re going
to put a piece that has a little bit of core in there to help flush the machine and flush
the fiber through the machine and see if we can get it to push through even faster.
Alright so that worked pretty good, let’s go with another non-core piece over from this
side.
And once again, you don’t want to be using the pusher when juicing in the Omega VRT juicer,
you want to just let things feed in and go in at their own pace.
Now the pulp has actually stopped flowing really good out of the machine, so that tells
me there’s some kind of backup situation in there, so now we want to grab a piece with
a lot of core in there to give it some fiber.
And you can actually hear the machine crush up that fiber and look at that, now we’re
getting a nice stream out, and that’s what you want to look for.
You want to get a nice constant stream whenever you put stuff in.
Now if you’re getting a block up like nothing’s coming out, you need to kind of change what
you’re doing and change your approach.
That’s why I call the Omega VRT juicer, it’s like, it has a steep learning curve,
or I call it juicing curve, and I have another really good video on juicing curves.
Every juicer has a different learning curve, like of course riding a tricycle that has
three wheels, you can get on it and just ride without falling off.
Getting on a bicycle, a little bit more difficult to learn because there’s two wheels you
might fall off.
And then of course what I want to do one day is ride a unicycle, I mean there’s only
one wheel, and you’ve got to really have good balance, so the Omega VRT’s probably
more like a bicycle, and it does take some learning on how to get it to use it properly,
so if you’re not up to that challenge, you might want to check my other videos for the
learning curve in juicers, and find out the juicers that are actually a lot easier to
use without thinking.
Because these days, unfortunately people don’t like to think, actually I like the challenge.
So next we’re going to put in a non-core piece because the last core piece really was
moving some pulp out of that.
And now it’s coming out kind of slowly so that’s definitely a good sign.
So we’ll probably put a piece that has a little bit of core in there, I think this
piece might be pretty good.
So next we’re going to put a nice core piece, so that’s very important to help push things
through the machine.
And you can hear it take off that core and chunk out that core, and you can see the pulp
starting to move out slowly.
Next let’s go ahead and put in a piece that has some more core in there because I wasn’t
seeing it move out and push out fast enough, and there it’s slowly moving out, once again.
So it looks like we’re getting a clog situation, so luckily enough we have only a few pieces
left with mostly core, and we’re just going to go ahead and feed those into the machine
and see if we can get the machine to just juice the rest of our pineapple.
So here’s the last piece of pineapple we’re going to put in, and hopefully it’ll juice
the rest of this and we’ll get some juice out.
So it’s taking it in there, we’re getting a little bit of backup, now this pineapple
has actually been sitting around the house for a few days, so once again I encourage
you pick your pineapples fresh and hard as possible and use them immediately.
If you let them sit around your house without refrigeration, they’re going to get a little
bit soft, and actually they’re not going to work as well as a nice hard, firm pineapple.
That’s the critical thing here besides cutting it properly, is getting hard, firm produce.
I can’t stress that enough.
So we do have a little bit of backup here, we’re going to use the pusher just to try
to clear that jam and help direct some pulp through the machine.
And I mean it looks like it’s pretty much done juicing.
We’re going to go ahead and turn this machine off, and I’m going to show you inside what
the machine looks like, and this is what it probably should look like unless you’re
using nice hard fibrous pieces and nice, hard, firm pineapples.
So you can [inaudible] take this machine part, inside the machine here, it’s just going
to be loaded with pulp, because what’s happened is the pulp’s staying in there and it’s
getting juiced, but it’s not getting fully juiced because it’s not getting ejected
out of the outlet port here, because this outlet port is getting clogged up with the
soft fibers that basically can’t push through the machine.
Now in general, I find that one pineapple can be juiced like this, but if you try to
put a second pineapple after the first pineapple, it’s definitely not going to work.
So if you want to juice two pineapples, juice one, stop, clean it all out, and then start
with a clean juicer and juice that other pineapple separately.
But you can see here, that one pineapple rewarded us with approximately three cups of fresh
pineapple juice, so let me tell you this pineapple juice is super-delicious.
Now for some people pineapple juices may be a little bit acidic, so I like to dilute it
down, and the fun thing to dilute it down with is some sparkling mineral water.
I got some Perrier here, we’re just going to go ahead and open this up, and just pour
some sparking mineral water into our juice, and now instantly we have a delicious sparkling
pineapple soda.
Nothing could be better and healthier than that.
So I’m going to go ahead and drink some of this, hopefully you’ve enjoyed this episode,
learning more about how to properly juice a pineapple in the Omega VRT, especially if
you have a soft pineapple and don’t cut it properly, you may run into some challenges,
so please be aware of that.
But, with proper produce selection, and proper feeding of the machine and paying some attention
on what’s going on, and making adjustments as you go, you can get successful results
every single time in the Omega VRT juicer.
Once again my name is John Kohler with discountjuicers.com, be sure to visit discountjuicers.com/youtube
for special promotional offers for our YouTube visitors.