Omega J8004 Nutrition Center Commercial Masticating Juicer, White

Comment: I've used up two centrifugal juicers in about 4 years. I decided to lay down the money and go with a great machine. Wow, I didn't expect it to provide such excellent results. It's very quiet; much more so than the Champion style or centrifugal style by leaps and bounds. You can talk while using it. I was afraid it would be slow. It's much faster than I was expecting with the auger style process. There is basically no foam in my juice which is magical. My centrifugal had almost as much foam as juice and foam is not good for health reasons and just loss. I mainly juice carrots with a 1/2 pear or 1/2 apple. Very nice. I tried beets, celery and even kale. No problem at all, except for digesting the beet juice. I did have to slice the beet. After reviewing all the videos I was worried that I'd have so much prep time. Not the case. I use whole carrots with an occasional trim at the top for the 1 1/2 inch opening. My centrifugals had a larger opening, but was odd shaped so large round carrots or other objects still would not fit. I saw videos of people tossing whole apples into their gee whiz centrifugal juicer. Who would want to do that. Toxic seeds and parts I don't want in my body. True, I've only used it for a month, but the quality of every piece seems superb. I would have no reason to doubt it will last 15 years. I have an engineering background so I look for how things are built, forgive me. I feel cleaning is easier than my centrifugals. I had to clean the pulp out of them a couple of times per juicing and that was tough. Also, this device is much easier to thoroughly clean. I decided against the Champion when I saw juice ooze out the side of the screen and items pop out the top. That just can't happen with this unit. Since I use it so often it has replaced the food processor on the counter top. It looks sharp in the kitchen and the handle makes it easy to pick up and move. I use a mixing bowl with suds to drop the items into for a final clean and disinfection after a rinsing and prior to a drip dry. We used the blank plate for frozen dessert, but ate too much to digest it well. We're learning about various juices and desserts as we can do so much more with this unit. The pure kale juice was an interesting exploration.

This juicer has more than exceeded my expectation.

Comment: My wife and I have had this for four months of intense juicing of cabbage and occasionally broccoli. My wife had multiple stomach and duodenal ulcers from medications due to a spinal injury and we combed the internet looking for studies on the best home remedies, as prescription antacids were not healing her. We chanced across two studies on raw cabbage juice healing ulcers in a matter of weeks, so that led me to research juicers.

There are four basic types of juicers. In order of general effectiveness on greens, they are as follows:

1. Spinning blade/centrifugal ($50-$200)
2. Single-gear masticating (like this one) ($200-$350)
3. Double-gear masticating ($425-$550)
4. Hydraulic press w/shredder ($1,000-$2,500)

We were hoping the ulcers would heal quickly and I didn't plan to invest much. In reading the reviews on the spinning blade-type extractors, they seemed a poor choice for leafy greens, but quite good for fruits and other types of vegetables. One additional caveat I found was that juice from such juicers didn't keep that long, apparently due to oxidation and heat friction. My wife grew up with such a juicer and she had always enjoyed it, but she agreed it wouldn't work well for wringing juice from a cabbage.

Next came the single-gear juicers, and these varied from steel to melamine construction to a new high-tech super-hard GE plastic. Steel can oxidize fruit juice and melamine is a soft plastic that is most known for appearing in contaminated animal food from China, which in tests artificially appears as protein. Neither of these sounded good, but in reviewing the latest versions of the J8006/J8004 (they are identical except for the color and $40 difference), I found Omega was using GE Ultem, a plastic at least six times harder than melamine for the augur. This was a huge plus to me.

The double-gear juicers appear to get about 15% more juice out of the same amount of produce, but take quite a bit more time to clean. They are also twice the cost of single-gear juicers. This wasn't worth it to me.

Finally, the hydraulic press juicers get the most juice out, but can cost thousands of dollars. I couldn't find one under $800.

Our Experience:

I decided to get the J8004 and we went to town using it. It's been used probably 40 times so far for about 45 - 60 minutes each time. I make two quarts of cabbage juice at a time and it's refrigerated, with my wife drinking all of it within two days. At the end of the second day, if it's been kept sealed in the refrigerator, the juice tastes virtually identical to when it was juiced (just shake it up a bit because the juice settles).

Directions for the juicer say it shouldn't be used more than 30 minutes at a time. This isn't a problem, as I prepare two plates of cabbage leaves, juice them, turn off the machine, then prepare two more plates of leaves at a time.

The Omega leaves some juice in the pulp, which I now recapture by feeding the mash back through the machine. Strangely, the extra passes go very fast compared with the first one with the leaves, basically because the mash goes in the tube with absolutely no friction, and is much less volume to handle. In general, if you are juicing cabbage leaves, this is how each pass juices out if you got 600 milliliters with the first two platefuls:

1st time - 600 milliliters
2nd time - 150 ml more
3rd time - 50 ml more
4&5th time - 50 ml more total

Yes, the double-gear machines might get more each pass, but I figure that putting cabbage through three times is more than equal to putting the it through twice on a double-gear, and I save $250 for that net of one extra pass.

The unit has held up well and has never stained from all the greens touching it, so save forty dollars and get this over the silver J8006 twin (both units are superior to the J8005 because that unit, strangely numbered higher than this, uses a melamine auger and has only a 10 year warranty). The parts all rinse clean in no time, save for the two filtering portions on the cone the augur presses against. These require a brushing motion (one is included) to clean, and even then the part with the fine mesh retains some cabbage fiber. Fortunately, we put the parts in the dishwasher where anything remaining can be blasted off.

We've used it to mass-grind coffee with an included grinding option. It grinds a pound of coffee in about three minutes.

You can't go wrong with an Omega J8004 if you are juicing greens. We would definitely buy this again, but due to the incredibly long warranty, we don't expect to buy anything for over 15 years!

UPDATE: We've now used it more than 60 days on cabbage and broccoli and used it to make wonderful blueberry sorbet (using the second cone unit used for grinding). Putting frozen wild blueberries into it makes a sorbet come out the end that if allowed to thaw, is a perfect cold blueberry juice. This summer we have been using it in this capacity far more than for cabbage. WONDERFUL!

Comment: Honestly I had never owned a juicer like this, but it does amazing things for you.

It has pretty much replaced my blender and food processor, I am a fan of raw food recipes, and while the recipe book suggests that something will take 50 min to prepare (due to the use of blender and food processor) I finished the dish in 30 min...it does a great job with nuts and all hard foods.

I've only had it for about 2 months but it seems really strong and keeps surprising me everyday with all the things I can use it for.

It is easier to clean than my old manual juicer so that's a plus, really easy to set up and use.

Great for wheatgrass! it gets the last drop of juice from it, sometimes I run the pulp through again and it gets more juice.

Comment: This is my first juicer and I am thrilled I made the right choice. I researched for about a month before I got my tax return and pulled the trigger, and it has turned out to be a great investment in my health. The machine is extremely durable as it has a full 15 year warranty. This is exactly the same model as the Omega J8006 that everyone loves so much (according to reviews) with the only difference being that it's white. A cosmetic difference but I'd rather keep the 40 bucks and be a little less fancy personally. Works great with everything I've thrown at it so far from wheatgrass to celery to carrots, apples, yams, pears, kiwis, zucchini, ginger, you name it. The only exception and this was an early mistake I made after I first got it and that is you don't want to juice bananas. Too mushy and just makes a mess. Extremely easy to take apart and clean though so within 5 minutes it was clean and ready to go again. Pulp comes out very dry so it is very efficient as well. All in all I think this model is probably hard to beat. Seems like it will last forever. Super easy to clean. What more could you want? 5 stars easy

Comment: Pros:
1. Solidly-built. Looks like it will last forever. (So is the 9000)

2. A breeze to clean. (Much faster than the 9000)

3. Better than Omega 9000 in that you can continuously juice large quantities without stopping to clean.

Cons:
1. Really small chute

2. Carrots are LOTS faster in the 9000 and seem to have a similar yield. If you're used to the speed of a centrifugal juicer, the slow speed of this juicer might seem tiresome.

3. You really need to push down hard in the 8004, so if you have any disabilities or wrist problems, this is NOT the juicer for you.

4. My old Omega 9000 is different, but no worse.
-- I'm not sure that the yield is all that different.
-- The taste is no different.
-- I'm not sure that the old Omega "heats the juice and destroys the enzymes" as the juice in the 9000 still comes out plenty cold. Instead of spreading this "rumor," someone should really test it and see if centrifugal juicing really "destroys enzymes."

5. The first time I used this juicer a few weeks ago, I started with spinach, then tried using a carrot to push it in, like with the 9000. Bad idea! The whole feed chute jammed up, and because of the "L" shape, it took me an hour to slowly pick out the spinach and extract the carrot.

Summary: Although this juicer is significantly easier to clean than Omega 9000, it might not be better for everyone. Please note that I'm comparing it to the centrifugal juicer that keeps the pulp in the basket for continuous spinning. I would not recommend a "pulp ejector" juicer to anyone (Too loud and wasteful of produce.)