Dualit Juice Extractor Review

What is the Dualit Juice Extractor?

The Dualit Juice Extractor is a centrifugal or ‘fast’ juicer. Although it’s the older model out of Dualit’s two-strong juicer offering, it has more power and greater capacity than the Dual-Max Juicer.

As a centrifugal juicer, the Dualit Juice Extractor uses fast-spinning stainless steel blades to extract pulp from fruit and vegetables. A stainless-steel micro-mesh double filter reduces the amount of froth. There are two pre-programmed speeds to choose from: one for soft fruit such as berries, and another for hard fruit and veg such as apples and carrots. The Dualit Juice Extractor’s feed tube has an impressive 8.5cm diameter, which fits whole fruits and veg.

Related: Best juicers

Dualit Juice Extractor – Design and features

The Dualit Juice Extractor is fairly compact, with a black-and-silver plastic body, a black pulp bin, and a transparent plastic lid and feed tube.

At 28.5cm wide and 36.2cm deep (without the jug attached), it won’t take up too much room on your worktop. However, at 45.8cm tall with the plunger pressed down, you’ll need plenty of space above. The power cable is a bit on the short side, measuring just 66cm.

The plunger itself is grooved, helping to ensure fruit doesn’t become stuck in the feed tube. However, this means the plunger needs to be inserted into the feed tube at a specific position.

The control panel is clear, with a green light displaying when the machine is ready to use. While ‘0’ functions as the off button, ‘1’ is the slower programme for softer fruit, and ‘2’ is faster and meant for hard fruit and veg. A metal ‘locking arm’ holds the lid in place. When it’s open, the control light turns red and the programme buttons will not work – a safety measure.

The transparent plastic juice jug is vaguely shaped like the juicer itself, which is a neat touch. Since no measurements are provided on the jug, it’s sometimes tricky to assess how much juice has been produced. However, it usefully comes with a lid that doubles up as a froth filter.

A cleaning brush is provided for scrubbing the mesh filter and the sharp metal blades.

Dualit Juice Extractor – What’s it like to use?

The assembly of the Dualit Juice Extractor is fairly straightforward, although not entirely intuitive. Thankfully, the instruction manual comes with visual aids on preparing, using and cleaning the juicer.

No recipes are included with the instructions, but the Dualit website does include a handful of product-specific recipes. There are no specific instructions as to which of the two programmes to use, but the line between soft and hard fruit and veg should be fairly obvious anyway.

The instructions also recommend that you avoid juicing foods with high starch content, such as mangos and papayas. Some pricier juicers, such as the Sage Nutri Juicer Plus, have the ability to process these fruits.

I started off by juicing apples on setting 2. The force of the motor with this setting is palpable and it does get quite loud – but you also get good results. Two average-sized Granny Smith apples yielded just under 150ml of juice with a tiny bit of froth.

Next, I tried juicing peeled oranges on setting 1, which were turned into liquid in two seconds. The plunger proved helpful here for keeping lighter and already chopped-up fruit from flying out of the feed tube.

Carrots took a little longer, but gave a good yield – around 6 medium-sized carrots produced 300ml of pure juice.

Some pressure needed to be applied to the plunger for carrots, and for beetroot, which I tried juicing next. While some juicers may discourage you from applying pressure on the plunger or forcing it down too quickly, it’s necessary when juicing root vegetables with the Dualit Juice Extractor.

The instructions recommend not operating the machine continuously with heavy loads for more than 10 seconds, allowing the motor to rest for five minutes between each use. I realised that not pressing down on the beetroot results in warmer juice, as the machine itself starts to heat up.

The Dualit Juice Extractor’s juice yield proved less impressive for leafy greens – but this is common among centrifugal juicers. A portion of 100g of kale yielded just 30ml of juice, while 100g of spinach produced 70ml. All the juice produced was free of pulp, seeds and other residue, even when I accidentally threw in a piece of unpeeled ginger!

The machine does keep on dripping well after the juicing has finished, so I’d recommend placing something beneath the spout when you remove the jug.

During juicing, a lot of fruit pulp clung to the juicer lid. Removing it without spilling was the first hurdle of clean-up. A few bits of pulp did fall into the machine, but this wasn’t difficult to remove.

While all fruit-contact parts are advertised as dishwasher-safe, the instructions come with the caveat that water temperature needs to be below 40ºC.  All the parts can only go on the top rack, and to make things more awkward, they need to be removed prior to the drying cycle. The coolest cycle on my dishwasher is 45-65ºC, and I didn’t particularly feel like stopping it in the middle and so I opted to wash them by hand.

The washing was surprisingly painless – no more difficult than cleaning your average blender. While this juicer is made up of a number of parts, they have fewer fiddly bits. A good rinse with warm water was enough to rid of most of the pulp, with only a bit of soapy sponge action was required. The mesh filter was the trickiest, but the cleaning brush proved handy here.

If you’re in a rush, I can certify that cleaning the juicer 12 hours later isn’t any more difficult than doing it right away – for better or for worse, the pulp retains some moisture and is still easily removable. Just watch out for the fruit flies.

Why buy the Dualit Juice Extractor?

The Dualit Juice Extractor is a powerful machine in the more affordable end of mid-range juicers. Only £25 more than the Dualit Dual-Max Juicer, it features a more impressive motor as well as a larger capacity for juice and pulp. While it lacks the extra frills of the Panasonic MJ-L500 Slow Juicer or the Sage Nutri Juicer Plus, it also comes with a smaller price tag.

If you don’t need extra functions such as pureeing or processing frozen ingredients, the Dualit Juice Extractor won’t disappoint.