You may be browsing the Goodnature juicing recipes, and wonder why most of the ingredients are all listed by weight, and not by the item. For example, we may list "apple - 1.5 lbs" while other recipe sites will list it as "3 large apples".
All of the professionals use recipes by weight for some important reasons, and here they are:
Variance in ingredients
Fruits and vegetables are natural items that grow in the ground, so they will vary a lot in size and weight. A large cucumber one week could be a lot bigger than the week before, based on seasonality and crop. Not to mention, items can be very different in different regions of the world. Check out this "large carrot" from a Japanese super market.
If the recipe you're making calls for "2 large carrots" and you're using carrots like above, do you think it will be balanced? Only if the creator of the recipe was also using huge carrots!
This may not seem like a big deal if you're just making juice at home for yourself, but if you ever plan on making larger batches, this variance in ingredient weight can make a huge difference. Think about a 30 lb batch of a recipe. If a "large apple" is 20% larger than what we used to make the recipe, that could end up being several pounds difference, therefore making your recipe extremely apple-heavy and producing too much juice. Of course, it could work the same in the other direction as well, under-producing juice.
Consistency
Using recipes measured by weight will give you much more consistency over the long run than doing it per item. If you are doing recipes by item, you may love it this time, but when you go to make it again a month now the ingredients might be different sizes and it will taste different than before. Fruits and veggies are already highly inconsistent from one crop to another (have you ever experienced a sweet carrot vs a bitter one?), so it's best to minimize other variance as much as possible.
Chefs always measure by weight
Any chef at any real establishment does everything by weight except for the highly consistent ingredients like liquid ingredients or flour. For these items, they might use volume measurements like cups or tablespoons. At Goodnature, all of our recipes are developed by a real chef, so we do things the right way! I highly recommend you start juicing by weight if you want to do things like the pros.
Juicing in Bulk
For the reasons mentioned above, it's especially important to measure by weight when juicing in bulk. Check out the below video for a complete tutorial on bulk juicing using the Goodnature Hummingbird commercial cold press juicer.
Developing your own recipes
If you're interested in developing your own unique juice recipes, I recommend checking out the Juicing Companion book by Chef Ari Sexner, the chef who developed all 140+ unique juicing recipes on our website. He has been consulting for juice bars for over 10 years and has personally created thousands of unique recipes through his work.
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