Love V8 but hate the price tag? Here’s how to make your own V8 juice at home!

Last week before my flight out to California I bought my first V8 juice. I paid $4.29 plus tax for it thanks to the lovely price gouging at JFK. It was a last ditch attempt to get some vegetables in a pretty lackluster airport dinner.

I’ve had the craptastic tomato juice airlines carry before. Once as a “hmm, let me try that out since everyone on a plane seems to love this stuff” and many other times in the form of a Bloody Mary after the upgrade list on Delta’s gate screens loving displayed MAT/G (<—that’s me and that’s a beautiful sight). To be blunt, it’s disgusting. I have a strong hatred towards jarred/canned tomato sauces and to me, that’s exactly what that stuff tastes like. So I had high hopes for the V8.

Fast forward 3 hours later and somewhere over the plains of Kansas, I broke it open, asked for a glass of ice and tried it out. Not bad. It really is like drinking your vegetables, they don’t lie. But of course my immediate thought was “I can totally make this at home for a fraction of the cost and control the flavorings”.

So I did.

When you pile up all the vegetables that eventually end up being gulped down in a glass, it’s pretty impressive. Or weird, depending on how you look at it. Yeah, I drank an onion. What of it?

This is a little more involved than making a vegetable smoothie or running some vegetables through a juicer. You want to cook it, blend it, food mill it up and then blend again. No master’s degree required or anything (which is good because otherwise I couldn’t make my own recipe), just a few added steps to get a more juice-like consistency that doesn’t lose any flavor (or nutrients!) at the same time. And if you’ve ever tried to go the easy route and just blend it up without the other steps, you’ll realize pretty quickly why the extra steps are worth it. Trust me. Chewing something that’s supposed to be a drink is just gross.

The end result is a perfect balance between tomatoes, other flavoring vegetables and spice. Rim it with some salt, throw it in a mason jar, squeeze some lemon on top and suddenly veggies become way cool.

Or, you’ve got one awesome base for a Bloody Mary. Either way works.

For the full recipe and ingredients click here.

*This post was originally published on Gina’s blog, Running to the Kitchen. For more from Gina, visit www.runningtothekitchen.com