Again, this is a 'love it' or 'leave it' review on my behalf. No middle line. My husband is a huge juice fan. He has an old metal juicer that is from the dinosaur age and truly a beast to move, use, and clean (with a big emphasis on cleaning difficulty). Though it's a great juicer, when it takes longer to make the juice and clean up than it does to make a five course meal, well, we tend to lose interest in our health kicks. So, I'm very big on doing endless research by reading reviews, blogs, online rating webs, etc. before buying anything. I did this for our mattress and it paid off nicely. After much research I opted for the Breville BJE200XL Compact Juice Fountain. Couldn't beat the price on Amazon. Killer deal! My only concern was performance. Well, it didn't let us down. First of all, this is a very noisy unit. You don't have to wear ear plugs, but keep the baby away as they might start bawling due to the loudness. Beyond that, we absolutely love this unit! Love it! Easy to use, fun to watch, super easy to clean, and the juice is superb! Some of the reviews comment on food bits flying out at times if you don't slap your hand or the tamper down over it when adding it to the mix. They're right. I'm pretty sure I've got a few bits of garlic and carrot on my kitchen ceiling, but they're tiny and made a pretty cool pattern. We don't worry about the tiny issues, because it's preventable. Just slap your hand over the softer additions immediately and you won't get it on the ceiling. Pretty simple and certainly not worth marking down the value of this product. But our greatest joy about this product is the ease of cleaning. OMG, but it is soooo simple and fast! We slick out the pulp bits into a dish for our chickens to eat (they Loooove us now!), and dump the plastic unit pieces into a bath of soapy water, rub down, rinse and towel dry. Easy! Fast! Great juice! The juice collecting container does hold enough for two very large wine glasses worth of juice (we like a little class with our juice). Not to mention how much fun it is to watch this unit in action. I did have a brief moment imagining Hannibal Lector shoving someone's hand into the unit (ugh!) for a movie concept--it's pretty efficient! This was money well spent, and if it did happen to break, we would buy another. So far not a hiccup from this one. It's been a smooth juice every day without a single issue. Oh, we add huge chunks of raw ginger to our juice with the hide on, and it does a great job grinding it down. If you want an affordable unit that performs flawlessly (beyond a few bits of food on the ceiling) then this is the one to buy. We highly recommend it! Read more
I, like probably everyone else lol, watched Fat Sick and Nearly Dead and immediately decided to try a juicer. I ordered the Breville BJE200XL Compact Juice Fountain. My sister and brother in law already had one and had nice things to say about it, so I copied them and got the same model they did. I figured for $90.00 I knew at least it would work well enough based on someone I knew who had it. I received it boxed appropriately and immediately took it out and washed it so that it was ready when I decided to do my first juice. I will admit I had a huge fear of the juice being gross tasting like when you get unsweetened cranberry juice. My fears were put to rest the first time I used it. My first juice was 2 apples, 1/2 a lemon, & and a ring of pineapple. It was decidedly good, tart, sweet, refreshing. After that I just juiced fruits at first that I thought might pair well together. Now I have moved on to carrots and cucumber and spinach. Carrots and spinach are awesome, carrots just add a sweetness but temper other sweeter fruits and spinach adds nothing as far as flavor only dark green color and nutrient rich juice. Cucumber is a bit over powering for me HOWEVER, it is a refreshing additive, I would caution to not add so much if you are skeptically of the flavor because cucumber does have a distinctive undertone that carries throughout the juice. Not terrible, just not for me in large quantities I don't think. About the juicer: It has 5 parts that need cleaning when you are done, the plunger (just rinses right off), the measuring cup/lid (again just rinses right out), the juicer lid & juicer pulp catcher base (again once you use the back end of the included scrub brush to scrape the pulp out these pieces just rinse right off), and the strainer/grater thingy in the center (the only piece that requires scrubbing to make sure the mesh is free from grainy debris so that next time the juice flows through nicely). All in all it maybe takes 20 min from start to finish for cleanup and that includes drinking your fresh juice. I have let everything sit, EXCEPT the mesh grater thing, for at least 20 minutes after juicing and have had no problems with cleanup at all, everything still rinsed off. I always scrub the mesh grater though, I don't have any interest in getting things dried onto that at all. As far as the fruits and veggies go, I was completely astounded at how dry the carrot dust (as I refer to it) was after juicing carrots, typically the harder the fruit or veggie the drier the pulp is. Things like blueberries, grapes, blackberries that are naturally apt to be mushy with too much handling naturally will yield wetter pulp. Apples and cucumber and spinach pulp is pretty dang dry in my opinion. The carrots are the driest but also the hardest. I would definitely, due to ease of cleanup and quickness of assembly and juicing, recommend this juicer or any Breville for that matter to anyone looking for an easy to operate intro juicer, I really enjoy it, and although I am not juicing 24/7, juicing is not a hugely time consuming hard process that keeps me from juicing regularly, basically every day. I found that after an all fruit fresh juice everyday for about 4 days I felt like my taste buds had changed a bit so that the fruit was almost too sweet and I enjoyed tempering it with carrots and spinach and found myself wanting to try other flavors. I haven't juiced extra to save for the morning yet, but I did get a glass bottle in which to store it, since I cannot yet get myself up early in order to juice in the morning. I also found it funny that I find myself craving fresh juice now. Also I tried commercial juice after 3 days of juicing everyday and it just tasted really bad to me. I would also swear I feel the fresh juice making the cells in my body come alive, now this may be all the natural sugar but I also don't crash after the tingling wears off like I do after I eat cake or something processed and sugary. So I found that interesting as well. Read more
