Rourke's Random Musings

Blend just yogurt and soy milk together and you’ll end up with something that doesn’t taste very good. You need to add fruit. Sepcifically, frozen fruit. Frozen fruit is what gives a smoothie its texture and its pleasantly cold temperature. Even one unfrozen ingredient will noticeably impact the smoothie’s texture.

Grocery stores and organic food megamarts sell a wide variety of flash-frozen fruit. Unless you have piles of free time, these stores will provide you with the bulk of your frozen fruit. The good news is that you can find a huge variety of frozen fruit in most stores — including cherries, blueberries, strawberries, peaches, pineapples, blackberries, raspberries and even premixed fruit blends.

Not all Frozen fruit is created equal. In San Francisco, the frozen fruit at Whole Foods is noticeably better that the stuff you get at Safeway. Moreover, the organic frozen fruit from Whole Foods actually makes better smoothies than the non-organic stuff from Whole Foods. Even that rule isn’t absolute, though, as the cherries from Safeway beat the ones sold at Whole Foods by a wide margin. Experiment and decide for yourself.

Using fresh fruit is a bad idea, but freezing your own fruit is an option. Frozen bananas aren’t generally available, and bananas are a smoothie staple. The process is pretty easy — you buy the fruit, you let the fruit fully ripen, then you cut the fruit up and put it in a zip-top freezer bag and put it in the freezer. Be careful, though, when putting the fruit into the freezer. Make sure you lay the pieces out as flat as possible in a fairly large zip-top bag and let the fruit freeze in as flat a configuration as possible (see picture below left). If you don’t do this you’ll end up with a huge glob of fruit that you need to chop up with an ice pick.

Let the fruit ripen before you freeze it. In the case of bananas, the riper you let them get the sweeter and creamier the smoothies will taste. In fact, you might even want to let the bananas get riper than you’d normally want them to be for eating. Frozen fruit is generally picked at or near full ripeness and flash frozen before transport. Most grocery store fruit is picked well beefore ripeness. The farther you are from where the fruit is grown, the less ripe that fruit was when it came off the tree. This means that, in general, you can buy better tasting fruit frozen than fresh.

Even so, you can’t buy all fruit frozen. You can freeze anything you buy, though, which opens the door to melon smoothies, mango smoothies, and just about anything else you can think of.

Sometimes you can get better fruit fresh than what’s available frozen. For examples, fresh picked May cherries from Brentwood, CA are far better than what you’ll find in the grocery store. Try bringing home a few pounds of those cherries, pitting them, and freezing them. The best smoothie this author’s ever had was made with cherries picked that way.

Don’t go too crazy freezing fruit and buying frozen fruit, though; fruit doesn’t last forever in the freezer. Store-bought frozen fruit begins to develop freezer burn at about four to six months. Fruit I’ve frozen myself is best used in the first month or two after freezing and starts to develop freezer burn and degrade in taste noticeably after that. That said, I’ve used fruit that’s been in the freezer for over six months and didn’t get sick or

You have quite a few choices when it comes to getting fruit to use in your smoothies. If you make smoothies every day then you have the option of buying a wide variety of fruit and trying out different combinations. If you make smoothies less often then you’re probably better off just keeping a few staples like bananas, strawberries, blueberries, and pineapple in your freezer. Either way, though, experiment some and try different fruits and different fruit sources rather than always using the same frozen fruit in every smoothie you make.