Tips for the perfect smoothie

Whether bought on the go or homemade at home. Everyone loves them and everyone drinks them. A healthy diet is often not so easy to implement in our fast-paced everyday lives. Especially with homemade smoothies, you can easily get your daily portion of fruit and vegetables. The best thing about homemade smoothies is that you know exactly what’s in them and can customise them to suit your personal taste and needs.
Not only does a smoothie provide you with lots of important nutrients to start the day, you can also enjoy your delicious smoothie as a snack in the afternoon, after sport or as an evening meal. With spices such as cinnamon, ginger or turmeric, you can easily add an extra dose of flavour to your smoothie to suit your mood.

It is best to choose fresh ingredients when shopping. If you make a large quantity of your smoothie straight away, this will extend its shelf life, and you can drink it without any problems even after 2 days in a tightly sealed container in the fridge. If possible, opt for seasonal and regional fruit and vegetables in organic quality. With seasonal produce from the region, you support regional farmers, have shorter transport routes and therefore get the maximum flavour from your ingredients. Unfortunately, regional does not mean that the produce is free from pesticides. That’s why it’s so important, especially with smoothies that you drink raw, that you mix them from organic ingredients.

It’s easy to tell from their great colour that green smoothies contain a lot of chlorophyll and secondary plant substances. These can strengthen the immune system and have an antioxidant, liver-cleansing and antibacterial effect. To prevent your green smoothie from becoming bitter, it is important to choose the right leafy vegetables and mix them with fruit and liquid. Baby spinach is a great vegetable for smoothies because it has little flavour of its own. You can buy it fresh, wash it, spin it dry and freeze it. This means you always have spinach to hand and can start blending at any time. The best thing about green smoothies is that the blending process breaks down the cell structure of leafy greens and makes the ingredients available to our body in the best possible way. Don’t be afraid to mix sage, spearmint, or lemongrass into your smoothie.

With enough liquid, your smoothie will have a creamy consistency and will be easy to drink. Once you have added fresh fruit and vegetables to your blender jug, add the liquid at the end. This ensures that the ingredients are close to the blade and well blended. Instead of water, you can also use isotonic coconut water, which is particularly great after sport. Plant-based milk alternatives such as rice milk or almond milk also make your homemade smoothie creamy and full-flavoured. Ice cream also makes smoothies nice and cold and refreshing, especially in summer.

Simple blender, hand blender or high-performance blender. Which one you choose depends on your choice of ingredients and how often you make smoothies. If you make your own smoothies at home several times a week and don’t buy expensive ones from out of town, you will save money, and it will definitely pay off in the long term to invest in a good high-performance blender. If you mostly blend frozen ingredients and green leafy vegetables, a high-performance blender is also essential. It’s best to observe your habits for a few weeks and then take your time to decide.

When choosing your ingredients, you can let off steam according to your taste, and these tips will make blending easier for you at the beginning.

– A ratio of 40 % vegetables and 60 % fruit is a good guideline for a balanced smoothie.
– You can mix special ingredients such as sprouts, nuts, ginger, herbs or cocoa into your smoothie as you wish.
– You can customise all smoothie recipes. Over time, you will get a feel for the ingredients and can easily blend your own smoothies.

Good luck and happy mixing!