Six-thirty this morning, hair still damp from a lap or two off Terrigal Beach, and I’m juicing beetroot on the bench before the kettle’s even boiled. It’s become a small ritual, this one. It started because a friend at the Kincumber growers market handed me a bag of beetroot she said she couldn’t get through fast enough. That was four months ago. The juice has outlasted the original bag of vegetables by a long stretch, and most weeks now I make a jug of it on a Sunday and drink it down through the week.
Why beetroot and apple, and not just beetroot on its own
Beetroot juice by itself is a lot. Earthy, a bit metallic, the sort of thing you drink because you’ve decided to, not because you want to. Apple changes that entirely. It brings sweetness without making the whole thing taste like a dessert, and it thins out the texture so you’re not left with something closer to a smoothie than a juice. I’ve noticed the ratio matters more than people expect. Too much beetroot and it tastes like soil. Too much apple and you’ve lost the point of adding beetroot at all.
The one I keep making is the colour, honestly. It’s a deep, almost stained-glass magenta, and there’s something about drinking that first thing that feels more deliberate than reaching for the same flat white. Whether that’s psychological or not, I couldn’t say. I just know it’s the drink I actually want to finish, which is more than I can say for half the health-food ideas I’ve tried and abandoned in my journal over the years.
What actually goes into the jug
Ingredients
- 2 medium beetroot (about 300g), scrubbed, trimmed and roughly chopped
- 3 Granny Smith apples (about 450g), quartered and cored
- 1 knob fresh ginger, about 2cm, peeled
- 1 lemon, juiced
- 250ml filtered water, or more to thin
- Ice, to serve
Method
- If using a juicer, feed the beetroot, apple and ginger through alternately, finishing with the lemon juice stirred through at the end.
- If you’re using a blender instead, roughly chop the beetroot, apple and ginger, add to the blender with the water, and blitz until smooth, about 60 to 90 seconds.
- Strain the blended mixture through a fine sieve or a piece of muslin cloth, pressing with the back of a spoon to get as much liquid through as possible.
- Stir the lemon juice through the strained juice.
- Taste and thin with a little extra water if it feels too thick or intense.
- Pour over ice and drink within the hour for the best texture, or refrigerate in a sealed jar for up to 24 hours.
Serves 2
How this fits into my mornings
I don’t drink this instead of breakfast. That’s the bit I’ve had to be firm with myself about. It sits alongside a proper breakfast, usually something like the quinoa breakfast bowl with roasted plums, and it’s more of a slow, deliberate glass than a meal replacement. What actually works, I’ve found, is treating it as a five-minute pause rather than something to skull on the way out the door. Stand at the bench, drink it slowly, look out the window. It sounds like nothing, and it mostly is, but it’s the kind of nothing that seems to set the tone for the rest of the day.
If you’re trying to build more of these small rituals into your week, the piece on the quiet link between food and sleep covers some of the ground I keep returning to in my own journal, particularly around how what I drink in the morning seems to echo through how I wind down at night.
A quiet opinion on juicing
I’ll say this plainly, because I think it gets lost in a lot of juice recipe content: I’ve gone off the idea that juice should ever stand in for a proper meal. I’d argue the whole cold-pressed, three-day-cleanse framing does more harm to people’s relationship with food than good, and I say that as someone who genuinely likes making juice most weeks. A glass of beetroot and apple juice is a nice addition to a morning. It is not, in my view, a strategy. That’s the one place I’ll push back a bit on how this category tends to get spruiked.
Serving it the way I do
My preference is a tall glass with plenty of ice, a wedge of lemon on the rim if I’m feeling fancy, and nothing else added. Some mornings I’ll top it with a splash of soda water if I want something with a bit more fizz to it, which turns it into something closer to what you’d order at a café rather than a health drink you’re forcing down. If you’ve got people coming for brunch, it also works well poured into small glasses as a starter alongside something like the roasted vegetable salad with baked fig and goats cheese, where the colours actually complement each other on the table.
A variation worth trying
When I want something with a bit more warmth to it, I’ll add a small piece of turmeric, about a centimetre, alongside the ginger. It shifts the colour slightly toward orange-red and gives the whole thing a spicier finish that I find works better in the cooler months. If beetroot on its own feels like too much of a commitment, the golden door favourite watermelon juice is a gentler place to start, and the ultimate green juice sits at the opposite end of the spectrum if you’re after something more savoury and green.
What I’ve noticed since making this a weekly thing
I can’t make any grand claims here, and I wouldn’t want to. What I can say is that I look forward to it, which counts for something in my book. My energy through the morning feels steadier on the days I have it, though that’s just as likely to be the ocean swim as the juice, and I’ve stopped trying to untangle the two. Nutrition Australia’s general guidance on fruit and vegetable intake is a decent reminder that whole vegetables still do more of the heavy lifting than any juice will, and I’d rather be upfront about that than pretend a glass of beetroot juice is doing something it isn’t. If you want a broader look at hydration through the warmer months, staying hydrated this Australian summer covers it properly, including where juice does and doesn’t fit into that picture. Healthdirect’s page on a balanced diet says much the same thing, in plainer terms than most wellness sites manage.
Anyway. The jug’s empty again by Wednesday most weeks, which tells me something about whether this one’s staying in the rotation. I reckon it is.
– Tanya Pryce, Golden Door Living
