The most popular smoothie recipe on Pinterest is a blend of berries and kiwis and has been pinned over 300,000 times. So there must be something good about it, right? I tried it out to see if this smoothie tastes as good as it looks.
My best attempt at Pinterest-worthy food styling.
The ingredients are pretty easy to track down: Blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, kiwi and orange juice. The berries should be frozen and the kiwi fresh.
I blended everything together using an immersion blender with attachment bowl, but any blender you have should work just fine. Even though the recipe is for one serving, the end result was quite a bit more than I was expecting so you could easily split this smoothie between two or three people. Since I don’t have any mason jars, I poured the smoothie into the next most Pinterest-y glasses I own — stemless wine glasses.
I ate (drank?) this smoothie for breakfast, and even though there was a lot of it, I was hungry again in less than two hours. To quell my hunger, I opted for something a little more substantial: Gnocchi and garlic bread. Though I prefer protein-heavy breakfasts so I don’t get hungry mid-morning, I could see this smoothie being a fitting breakfast if you don’t need much to get going first thing.
Besides not being very filling, the smoothie also has only one flavour note. Despite all the sugar in it (from the juice and fruit), the smoothie isn’t very sweet, and the blueberry flavour is dominant even though it’s the ingredient there’s the least of. The author of the recipe suggests you customise the recipe to match your tastes, and I agree. I made the recipe as written and it wasn’t great. Here’s how you can make yours much better:
- Improve the texture. The three different berries and kiwi all contribute seeds to the smoothie, which makes for an unpleasant texture. Even if I had kept blending until the seeds were as small as I could get them, the texture still have been gritty. If that’s not your thing, try swapping some of the berries out for other fruit or cut the core out of your kiwi so the seeds don’t go in the blender.
- Add depth of flavour. Make every sip of your smoothie more flavorful by adding in some tasty layers, like coconut milk, agave, fresh lime or lemon juice and zest. Hit your tastebuds with add-ins that boost sweet, floral or tart flavours that complements the smoothie’s main ingredients.
- Make it filling. Throw in yoghurt, protein powder, leafy greens, peanut butter or oats to bulk up your smoothie so it fills you up ’til lunch. If you go with some of the more savoury additions, you may want to adjust other ingredients to match that flavour profile. An added bonus, a lot of these substitutes make your smoothie healthier.
The smoothie is fine as a refreshing snack or if you don’t need a filling breakfast, but it’s much better to add to it rather than follow the original recipe.
This Is the Most Popular Smoothie on Pinterest [The Kitchn]
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