Hands up if you don't know who Jack La Lanne is. No, me neither but apparently he is a legend in fitness circles across America since 1936. I have been watching the advert for the Jack La Lanne Power juice on various home shopping channels for years now and was always amazed by how easy to ... Read review
Advantages: Quiet motor, easy operation, assembly. Disadvantages: Bulky, time consuming to clean.
...if you don't know who Jack La Lanne is. No, me neither but apparently he is a legend in fitness circles across America since 1936. I have been watching the advert for the Jack La Lanne Power juice on various home shopping channels for years now and was always amazed by how easy to use and effective it looked. Jack La Lanne's heady claims that regular juicing makes you look and feel younger may be a little far-fetched but the product itself looks ... ...required.
The Jack La Lanne boasts an accessory kit worth twenty-pounds but this is a laughable marketing ploy. All you get is a plastic wired brush, base, measuring jug and overflow platform. The brush is nothing you cannot get from a discount store for twenty pence, the base is a superfluous, functionless addition, the jug is a nice size but hardly essential when a decent sized glass would work too and the overflow platform is made ... more
Hands up if you don't know who Jack La Lanne is. No, me neither but apparently he is a legend in fitness circles across America since 1936. I have been watching the advert for the Jack La Lanne Power juice on various home shopping channels for years now and was always amazed by how easy to use and effective it looked. Jack La Lanne's heady claims that regular juicing makes you look and feel younger may be a little far-fetched but the product itself looks impressive and he is in his 90's! After trying a cheap Cookworks Juicer that disintegrated in a week, despite much chopping I was finally convinced to spend the admittedly expensive fifty-five pound this cost me on eBay.
The first thing I noticed on delivery is that it comes in a huge box! Thankfully this is because it arrives disassembled However, after clipping the five parts together it is still a bulky machine with dimensions of 15" L x 12.13" W x 7.25" H this takes up most of the work surface in our already small kitchen. It is a hefty so and so to at fifteen pounds, that's seven bags of sugar people! As such this will be unlikely to fit safely on even the sturdiest shelf. Fortunately assembly is simple enough with the motor, filter, blade, chute and pulp container clipping neatly together with mere glances at the step by step illustrations required.
The Jack La Lanne boasts an accessory kit worth twenty-pounds but this is a laughable marketing ploy. All you get is a plastic wired brush, base, measuring jug and overflow platform. The brush is nothing you cannot get from a discount store for twenty pence, the base is a superfluous, functionless addition, the jug is a nice size but hardly essential when a decent sized glass would work too and the overflow platform is made obsolete by the fact there is no overflowing! All in all the accessory kit is worth at most a couple of quid and merely makes your already large juicer bigger.
So, after discarding the various accessories I can get down to some serious juicing. The joy of the Jack La Lanne compared to its cheaper brethren is that it accepts a large amount of whole fruits and vegetables with little or no chopping. After the peeling and dissecting required in the Cookworks version this is bliss and indeed simplicity itself. After locking the juicer down with the steel safety bar (always the sign of a powerful machine) I can switch it on. Jack La Lanne claims the juicer has a "whisper quiet" motor this is certainly seems to be the case compared to the hammer drill noise of my previous model. The instructions state that I should leave the motor running for at least thirty seconds before juicing to let the motor get up to speed. This allows me time to check the instructions for what fruits I should and should not use. The Jack La Lanne comes with a handy quantity and recipe guide telling you what fruits and vegetables work best in the juicer with recipes for a "Vitamin C Boost" and "Tropical Punch". There does however, seem to be some discrepancies as to what fruit and veg I should use with celery being fine but leek not. I would have thought they had a similar consistency, not that I fancy a leek juice! Bananas are also a no-no as they clog the filter and have very little juice. As this is an American product I also found the recipes a little obscure with some fruits I had never even heard of.
Never one to follow a recipe I decide to go for my own choices. After all you can only make what you have in your fruit bowl or veg rack. Using two carrots, an orange (peeled, you can drop them in unpeeled but it is very bitter) and two apples I drop them whole into the feed chute and push the plunger in after them. One thing I would say about this juicer is be quick with your plunger! On our first attempt I was peppered with bits of projectiled pulp. A good sign that the 3200rpm motor is up to speed but makes for a messy kitchen. The juice goes through with little effort on my part and the motor makes very little noise compared to its cheaper counterpart. Two glasses of pulp free, smooth juice deposited neatly into the jug . However, perhaps the only problem when making the juice is in the nozzle the juice comes out of. Being almost flat it does not flow as directly as I would like into my glass/jug. As such there can be a fair amount of juice left balanced on the lip. Despite the instructions claims that powering down for a minute allows the rest of the juice to filter through I still have to tilt the juicer slightly to drain the excess. A minor irritation but still an irritation.
Of course the most important thing is how the juice tastes and in this respect the Jack La Lanne excels. Juice is smooth and pulp free very much like the expensive juices you buy in the supermarket. Juicing individual fruits such as oranges and apples is perhaps the ultimate example of the difference between this juice and that on the supermarket shelves. That "juice from concentrate" you buy is nothing like what the truly "pure" Jack La Lanne juice looks, smells or tastes like. Orange juice has none of the luminescence of the carton variety and apple juice is light green rather than brown. As for La Lanne's claims of youth and energy I do feel more awake of a day after drinking fresh juice but it is not going to roll back the years. It is after all juice, not botox or eight hours in the gym!
Of course, after using the juice the worst part is the cleaning. Jack La Lanne claims this is easy to clean and dishwasher safe. Unfortunately, I have no dishwasher so cleaning in the good old sink is a little more arduous. Disassembly is very simple with it all clipping apart very easily. The first thing that you will want to tackle is the massive pulp container. What is good about the pulp is that so much juice is extracted it is merely damp rather than wet. La Lanne claims the pulp can be used in fruit pies or vegetable casseroles and can be frozen but I prefer my orange and carrot peel to go in the bin thank you. Cleaning all the parts is relatively simple although a little time consuming. I have found the best way is to soak them in hot, soapy water for ten minutes and then rinse them under the hot tap using a wire brush to clean filter and blade. In total it takes about fifteen minutes to clean the juicer so I try to make a good litre of juice per use so it only needs cleaning once. La Lanne recommends drinking the juice within a few hours as the vitamins disperse but I have found the taste remains fine in the fridge for a few days.
So, am I impressed with my juicer? Indeed I am. As a juicer it is efficient, quiet and effective although it is disappointingly more messy, bulky and more time consuming to clean than I imagined. The lack of waste makes this a cheap alternative to other juicers and it certainly tastes better than shop bought juice. Expensive at it's RRP of ninety-nine pound I do however, think fifty-five on eBay is a reasonable price and would recommend it.
Advantages: Fantastic tasty and healthy juice with no wastage Disadvantages: Upper chrome rim is actually plastic and a little brittle
...bought. It is a Jack La Lanne juicer. At first you think all it does is makes juice but it most definitely is more than that. This thing has a 'blade' which is actually a flat steel disc with raised points on it, making it very safe to clean. As you drop food through the chute above, it presses on the blade which grinds it until it is small enough to be flung aside against a conical mesh rotating at the same high speed as the blade. The centrifugal ... ...to be forced outwards from the fruit and the few remaining pips and bits of skin are flung into a bucket for re-use. You don't need to peel or chop the fruit or vegetables (except oranges and grapefruit because they have sour flavours and are a little tough). You can juice almost anything including the less obvious like celery and ginger which you use in recipes in the books that are included.
Obviously I went and bought one of these things. I was ...
psteadma 09.02.2006
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Jack La Lanne 1955
Advantages: Looks good, really throws out the juice Disadvantages: Won't take whole fruit such as apples and pears; fixing screw used on blade
...'slimline' version of the original Jack La Lanne power juicer but is supposed to have the same effectiveness. This is my first juicer and juice itself is gorgeous.
Learning curve - after two weeks and half a dozen attempts at juicing, I really feel I have the hang of it. Despite what it says on the JLL website, it really doesn't handle whole fruit such as apples and pears. Now I chop each into about three or four pieces and these push through without ... ...have to slice off the skin, leaving the pith, and whoosh, out comes this luscious fresh juice. Pear is fabulous, on it's own or with apple, as is pineapple. Strawberries, rasps with orange - mmmmmm - and you don't have to take the stalks out of the strawbs (as I realised part way through!). Carrot, cucumber and celery - yuk. I blame the cucumber. Friends say carrot and orange is good but I've not tried it yet. I was a bit disappointed that banana ...
tynegal 29.08.2007
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Jack La Lanne 1955
Advantages: Healthy, quick and easy, quiet, saves money, Disadvantages: Bulky
...also acknowledged just how healthy Jack La Lanne and his wife looked, and just how much energy they had.
Advertised on channels.. Sky 641
You see like most people we over indulge, it doesn't even have to be Christmas we eat all those things that we should not and have very little time for exercise and so generate very little energy.
So we agreed we would try it especially as it came with a 30 money back guarantee.
I remember we were living with ... ...drove the benefits of the Jack La Lannne's Power juicer. I also remember on the day it arrived we spent quite a lot of money £30.00(if I remember correctly) on fruit that only lasted that day as the end product was superb you can mix any combination you desire.
I unpacked the juicer to find that there were 9 different parts 8 of which had to be constructed before I could use it, daunting no not at all it was easy and took only a couple of minutes, ...
shell72 22.03.2006 (08.04.2006)
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Jack La Lanne 1955
Advantages: Easy parts replacement, easy to use Disadvantages: Bulky, does not always live up to it's reputation
...so we bought him a Jack Le Lanne power juicer!
I've seen the info ads on the late night TV and thought the price was a alittle overinflated (£119), but never having purchased a juicer before or really looked into them, I later found out this was around the average price!
We purchased ours from Ross Fitness online, great service so far (although I'm still waiting for my replacement juicer to turn up) at the bargain price of £45!
There we were, ... ...went out and filled the fridge with fruit and veg and thought "here we go"!
Initially the juicer worked fine, for about 10 minutes! It is advertised as being whisper quiet, which so far it hasn't been, and a wonder to work with. I can safely say, so far it hasn't been either of these.
After a few minutes of initial use, not continued, just for short spurts, we noticed a rather strange odour.
We switched off, had a check and noticed that the hopper ...
shazzy1967 11.10.2006 (30.01.2007)
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Jack La Lanne 1955
Advantages: Whisper quiet motor Disadvantages: It's quite large
...weeks ago I purchased a Jack La Lanne juicer, I had seen the infomercials on this product but was very sceptical as to how good it actually was, after all it was an American advert and they are known to exagerate to the extreme. So when I saw this juicer in a local store (with a 16 day money back guarantee) I thought "What the hell, lets give it a try."
Who is Jack La Lane?
==================
Jack La Lanne was born 26th September 1914 in San Francisco. ... ...skinny. However all was to change for him when he learned about weight training and healthy eating. He developed into a muscular and symetrical person with a great physique. One of his many achievements include swimming from Alcatraz to Fishermans Wharf whilst he was in handcuffs, in less than 30 mins.On completion of this he managed to do 30 press ups!!!
Now at an age of 91 he still looks good.This is one of the many reasons why he has been voted ...
snake_plissken 07.03.2006
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Jack La Lanne 1955
