Many individuals, including office-goers, students and people from other walks of life, don’t have enough time to extract fresh juice at the start of each day. Apart from being a time-consuming process, nobody wants to peal fruits or vegetables on a consistent basis. Hence, the question “Can you freeze juice from juicers?” is becoming a common query.
In order to help out, we’ve prepared this guide to give a brief answer if it is a good idea to freeze juices. We’ll also have a quick look at how a beverage, which has been frozen for quite some time, compares against fresh juices in terms of nutrients, antioxidants and other essential minerals.
Can You Freeze Juice from Juicers?
In order for busy people to save time from preparing their homemade juices, they prefer to prepare a huge quantity of fresh juice at one time before storing it for future use. However, can you freeze juice from juicers?
As similar to any products, the answer to that question is “Yes, you can freeze juice that has been prepared from a juicer.” It might not contain the original taste as well as the concentration of the vital nutrients, but it is still consumable.
That is due to the reason that as soon as you peel any fruit or vegetable, it tends to lose essential nutrients after coming into direct contact with the sunlight and external environmental elements. It just takes a few seconds for some nutrients to dissipate and that is the exact reason why a vast majority of fitness experts recommend to drink fresh juices at the earnest.
Meaning, it is better to freeze juice rather than pre-peel the ingredients and store them for juicing.
When you store this juice in a deep freezer, it is quite an obvious fact that it will lose some of its vitamins along with other such ingredients. However, it is still a better idea to consume frozen beverages than having to drink pasteurized juices.
In addition, as compared to raw juices which tend to stay fresh, inside a refrigerator, for just a couple of days, frozen beverages incorporate a longer shelf life of up to several months. In this way, you don’t have to deal with the extra hassle of having to prepare fresh juice every morning.
Factors Affecting the Shelf Life of Frozen Juices
If you’re looking to freeze fresh juices, it might be beneficial to consider a number of different factors. All these factors play a direct role in determining how well the juice will retain its essential nutrients after getting converted into a frozen form.
So, if you intend to freeze juices on a consistent basis, it might be better to prefer one vegetable over the other, and you can also prefer a particular type of juicer for this specific purpose.
Type of Juicer
When it comes to juicers, they are generally categorized into two different types. One of them is the centrifugal juicer, and the other one is the masticating juicer.
The centrifugal juicers are usually the first choice of juicing-enthusiasts who like to prepare fresh juice in a short span of time. Incorporating a higher RPM rate, this type of juicer can come up with a fresh beverage in as low as just three to five minutes.
However, since they tend to produce a lot of oxidation during their extraction process, juices extracted via the centrifugal juicers tend to have a lower shelf life.
Masticating Juicers, on the contrary, is quite popular for extracting fresh juices which are more resistant towards oxidation. If properly stored and refrigerated, you can use frozen juices, extracted via masticating juicers, for several months.
Vegetables and Fruits
If you’re using fresh vegetables and fruits for extracting juices, there is a big chance that the juices, made from these food items can have a shorter shelf life as compared to other juices which are prepared via frozen products.
Basically, fresh food items have to pass through a number of different stages before they reach your kitchen shelf. After getting harvested from a particular field, they are being transported from one place to the other which exposes them to regular sunlight, moisture, and other environmental elements.
As a result, they might have already lost a big proportion of their nutritional contents before you use them for preparing fresh juices.
As per the frozen products, they are converted into this form as soon as they’re harvested. In this way, they are more than capable of preserving a big proportion of essential nutrients, vitamins, and antioxidants.
So, since the juices extracted from frozen products already contain a greater amount of nutrients at the time of extraction, they’ll also have more of them when you use them in the frozen form.
Having said that, if you can purchase fruits or vegetables which are harvested a couple of days ago, or even if you can get them directly from the farmers, they are a better option than any one of the aforementioned food items.
Fresh Juice vs. Frozen Juice
If you’re a real health-conscious person, you might be aware of the fact that it’s the antioxidants, vitamins and the essential minerals which makes up a bigger proportion of fresh juices. All these components tend to have positive effects on your body, in one way or the other.
This is exactly the reason why millions of people all around the globe prefer to start their day with nothing but fresh juices. However, when it comes to frozen juices, they tend to lose some of these components with the passage of time.
As per the water-soluble minerals, which includes vitamin C, they aren’t normally affected. So as a result, if you’re drinking frozen beverages, you might not be getting all the health benefits which are usually associated with fresh juices but all is not lost as well.
Final Conclusion
This isn’t a claim that fresh juices will always have a greater nutritional value as compared to that of frozen juices. However, if you’re quite a busy person, freezing a juice that has been freshly prepared from a juicer is a good idea.
Although you will not be able to get the full benefits, you are assured that you are not drinking something that is stale.
