Which Cucumbers Are Best For Juicing?

I recently went on a mission to figure out which cucumber is best for juicing – from both the taste and cost perspective. The short version? Use hot house/seedless cucumbers for your green juices.

I love my green juices, especially a green lemonade. I love how my green juices have helped with my weight loss. I drink my juice in the evening if I am home and drink at least 16 ounces with the average at 24 ounces. I make a big batch of green juice each weekend and then freeze it so I am always ready – just pull out 1 or 2 jars and I can have my green juice.

I’ve had a few people ask me why I drink the green juice in the evening and not in the morning. Simple! The mornings are reserved for my green smoothies. The smoothies give me energy which is great in the morning and the juices I find are better for detox and since they aren’t as sweet, they work well in the evening.

Hot House vs Regular Cucumbers for Green Juices

Yes, green juice is expensive – you can check out my breakdown of the costs to make a green juice. I had been using “hot house” cucumbers – also called seedless or English cucumbers – to make the green juice. Generally the seedless/hot house cucumbers will be wrapped in plastic because their skin is very soft compared to the regular cucumber. They are basically twice as expensive as regular cucumbers – whether you buy organic or conventional – they will add approximately $0.50 cents to each 16 ounce of jar if you use the green juice recipe I use.

During one trip to Whole Foods, organic regular cucumbers were on sale so I figured it would be a good chance to try using a regular cucumber instead of the hot-house cucumber. For reference, I had been using conventional hot house cucumbers.

To run my test I bought the following types of cucumbers:

  • organic regular cucumbers
  • conventional regular cucumbers
  • organic hot house cucumbers
  • conventional hot house cucumbers

I then purchased the rest of the ingredients to make the green lemonade recipe. I created two batches – one organic test batch and one conventional test batch.  To try to keep the test as pure as possible, I bought two bunches of lacinato kale and split evenly into each test juice subject. I tried to buy apples and lemons that were as close to each other as possible.

I created the juices and then tasted each. The difference was AMAZING. The two regular cucumber batches had a very similar taste and the two hot house/seedless cucumber batches also had a very similar taste. There are benefits to buying organic but let’s leave that discussion for another post.

The regular cucumber juice tasted harsh and frankly was hard to swallow. The juice had a somewhat medicine-like and bitter taste. I could tell in every sip that the cucumber was present and was in charge of the juice. From my research, the bitterness mainly comes from the seeds in the regular cucumber.

The hot-house/seedless cucumbers produced a much smoother, cleaner tasting juice. It was easy to swallow and wasn’t overpowering over the other fruit and veg in the juice. Basically these juices are my favorite.

Obviously this test is YMMV and your results may differ. But if you have tried green lemonade or any green juice that uses cucumbers and didn’t care for the taste, I urge you to try the give the recipes another chance using a hot house/seedless cucumber.

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