You may have noticed how often apples appear in our recipes. They're definitely our #1 juiced ingredient. They're very firm and juicy, which work well with both centrifuge and masticating types of juicers, and they yield a lot of juice for their size.
We like to use apple variants that are more on the firm side. So when we're in the grocery store, we look for the common firm apples like granny smith, pink lady, fuji, or gala. Basically, whatever is firm and on sale is what we go with.
We purposely avoid specifying which variant to use in our recipes, because it doesn't really matter. However, we do tend to avoid using soft apples like red delicious. They tend to get a bit stuck in our masticating juicer and it ends up looking like a 7-Eleven slurpee machine.
Choosing Apples
Good
- Tight skin
- Heavy for its weight
Avoid
- Wrinkly/old looking skin
- Gashes
Juice Prep
Apples are pretty straightforward. After rinsing, chop it into quarters so it'll fit in your juice-chute.
You can remove the stem if you'd like, but it doesn't matter too much because it'll go into the pulp chute.
Should I de-seed my apples?
Apple seeds are a touchy subject in the juicing world because they contain amygdalin, which turns into cyanide when the seeds are crushed or chewed.
After researching it thoroughly ourselves, we don't bother removing them because we found we'd have to eat 200+ seeds in a sitting for it to potentially be harmful. If you're making juice for young children, we do recommend the extra step of taking out some of the seeds just to be on the safe side.
To put your mind at ease (or scare you more), each apple can contain between 0 - 20 seeds. 243 - 6,804 apple seeds would be needed to kill a 180 pound person. I know, it's a huge range, but that's because the range of cyanide per seed varies.
If you want to avoid the seeds entirely, just cut around the core and dispose of it. Nobody wants to stand there for 20 minutes picking out seeds for an extra few ounces of juice.
