Living in NYC with a kitchen the size of a bathroom, Sean and I have to be ruthless with the appliances that are allowed in the apartment. While we are pretty good at creating storage and squirreling things away, there are some things where I draw a mental line. No matter how delightful I find fresh juices or odd veggie juice combos in cocktails or for breakfast, we just don’t have the space for a juicer that takes up a big chunk of real estate.
Our apartment from the living room, you can see the tiny closet-sized kitchen past the pink couch. 🙂
A couple weekends back I was reading about homemade nut milks and tips for using nut milk bags. I started wondering if you could use similar processes to make juices instead of nut milks. After a bit of Googling and some forum reading, I bought this 2-pack of nut milk bags for $7 to try it out.
How To Make Fresh Juice with a Nut Milk Bag and a Blender:
I found a juice recipe that sounded nice with beets, apples, mint, ginger, and kale.
I peeled the ginger and beets and added the whole lot to the Vitamix with some water + pressed apple juice to make blending easy.
Then I poured the whole mixture into the nut milk bag and let it drain into a bowl with a spout. (You don’t actually need the colander I’ve got in the photo. It works perfectly without it as well!)
After gravity drains all of the juice it can out of the nut milk bag, it’s time to start squeezing with your hands. What’s so great about the nut milk bags is that they’re really strong and can take a lot of pressure to get all of the juice out of your pulp.
After you’re done squeezing, your pulp will look something like this. I find it so interesting that it’s such a muted, pale color after how vibrant the fruits and veggies are. It’s super easy to clean the bag, you just need to dump the pulp into the trash or compost and then rinse the bag + soak it for a moment in soapy water.
I like to store and drink the juice throughout the week, but these fresh juices make a huge difference in making interesting cocktails. I also like to make juices when I don’t have time to infuse an ingredient in a spirit.
A short list of fresh fruit and veggie cocktails where you can play with juices vs. infusions:
- Beet Down Cocktail: (Beets, Aperol, Ginger)
- Carrot Cocktail with Tequila and Fresh Orange Juice
- Tomate Fresca
- Prickly Pear Gimlet
- The Companion: Pear, Black Pepper, Rum
- Beetle Juice: Beets, Tarragon, Lemon, Gin
I’ll be posting some cocktail juice combos throughout the spring and summer over on my cocktail Instagram! 🙂
