[Review] One minute, one glass: Hurom's H90 makes cold-press juicing surprisingly easy

Everyone knows eating fruits and vegetables in the morning is good for you — but when you are rushing to get ready for work, actually preparing them is easier said than done. It is not uncommon for produce bought with the best of health intentions to sit untouched in the refrigerator for days.

What if you could turn that fruit and those vegetables into a single glass of juice in almost no time? Dropping carrots and a pear into Hurom's H90 slow juicer, a full glass was ready in under a minute. No sugar or syrup was added, yet the natural sweetness of the pear blended with the mild sweetness of the carrot to produce something tastier than expected. Above all, the speed made it easy to think: this is doable even on a busy morning.

The first thing that stood out when using the H90 was how simple the controls are. The operation comes down to loading the ingredients, turning a dial and pressing it. There are no rows of buttons to puzzle over, which made getting started straightforward.

In practice, juicing carrots and a pear together took less than a minute per glass. Particularly striking was how quickly even the firm carrots were processed. Having everything in one glass felt far more convenient than eating each fruit and vegetable separately every morning.

The taste exceeded expectations. Nothing beyond carrots and pear went in — no sugar, no syrup — yet the juice was plenty sweet. The pear's natural sweetness rounded out the carrot's distinctive aroma so it was barely noticeable. No sweetener was needed to match the flavor of a store-bought juice.

Noise was not much of an issue either. Kitchen appliances can feel intrusive early in the morning, but the H90 ran quieter than anticipated.

The H90's usefulness extends well beyond fruit and vegetable juices. Kabocha squash was fed through the machine as part of making kabocha porridge. The juicer does not produce finished porridge on its own, but it handled the grinding step, simplifying the cooking process considerably.

The name "slow juicer" makes it easy to think of the appliance only in terms of juice, but being able to use it in other cooking preparations proved to be a genuine advantage. The morning routine could be: juice with carrots and pear; later, grind kabocha or other ingredients for a recipe.

With any juicer, cleaning matters as much as performance. No matter how fast the machine makes juice, if disassembling and scrubbing multiple parts afterward is a chore, it will naturally get used less on busy mornings.

The H90 addresses this with a rinse-clean function that runs a basic cleaning cycle automatically after use, making post-juicing cleanup less of a hassle than expected. From juicing to a quick rinse, the whole process required little effort.

The clean design was another plus. The machine's simple silhouette blended naturally into the kitchen. Since a juicer tends to stay out on the counter rather than being stored away after every use, not clashing with the kitchen's look is a meaningful benefit.

There were drawbacks. The unit is fairly large. In a spacious kitchen that is not a problem, but in a tighter space, finding a permanent spot for it requires some planning. The clean design notwithstanding, the machine has a physical presence that is hard to ignore.

Disassembly, unlike operation, was not intuitive from the outset. Running the machine is as simple as "turn and press," but taking it apart for the first time required some trial and error to figure out which parts come off and how. However, after a few uses the structure became familiar and the process easy.

The biggest takeaway from hands-on time with the H90 was that it changed the assumption that cold-press juicing is a hassle. Carrots and a pear produced a full glass in under a minute, the noise level was low, and the ability to grind other ingredients for cooking added further utility. At the very least, the barrier to getting a serving of fruit and vegetables into a busy morning has been meaningfully lowered.