Healthy Smoothie Recipe: 5-minute Frozen Chocolate & Berry
Being a busy person often times means that you don’t have the time to think about nutrition pre and post workout. (Or even as a snack for that matter.) Nutrition is absolutely important and critical on your path to fitness and well-being.
We’re just going to come out and say it – smoothies are pretty awesome. They can be packed with nutrients that satisfy your hungry or cravings (even those dangerous sweet cravings) and can help fuel your quick workouts (or help you recover after one).
Here’s a smoothie recipe we’ve adapted from knowgenie’s Frozen Chocolate Healthy Protein Smoothie.
Jump to the Healthy Frozen Chocolate & Berry Smoothie Recipe
Healthy Smoothie with a few twists
The recipe from knowgenie uses milk as the base and frozen fruit such as blueberries and mangoes. We’re going to replace that with water and a heaping teaspoon of coconut milk powder. Yes, omitting the milk will cut some protein. But it will also cut some calories. Besides, it’s all about experimenting sometimes.
If you have a dairy milk alternative, such as almond milk or soy milk, feel free to use that. And yes – huge fans of coconut! So, if you have coconut almond milk – use it!
And for the fruit – we’re replacing it with frozen mixed berries. It’s what we had laying around.
For our protein powder, we had a vegan chocolate peanut butter blend, so we’re going with that and omitting the cocoa powder.
We also found that if you have another Greek yogurt, such as nonfat or low-fat vanilla, it adds some flavor and sweetness. Watch the sugar! We try to go for low or no sugar whenever possible.
We also used the same type of single serve blender.
Healthy Smoothie Recipe – The fitblendr Version
Smoothie Ingredients
- About 3/4 cup water (or almond milk)
- Heaping teaspoon of coconut milk powder (can omit if not using water)
- 1 scoop Vegan Chocolate Peanut Butter Protein Powder
- About 2 or 3 heaping tablespoons Greek yogurt
- Frozen mixed berries
- 1/2 banana, cut into pieces (preferably frozen)
Creating the Healthy Smoothie
As the knowgenie post says, the ingredients should be put in a certain order, so that the fruits are closest to the blades. Since we have a flip blender like knowgenie, we put them in this order:
Water, coconut powder, protein powder, yogurt, frozen fruit, bananas
For a tradition blender, reverse it:
Water, frozen fruit, bananas, powders, yogurt
Then just start blending! We found that we had to stop and shake the cup a few times to really mix everything together. After two cycles of blending (about 20 seconds each), it was done!
Note: You’ll want to adjust to the consistency you want. We prefer our shakes a little thicker – so we added some more yogurt. For a thinner consistency, add more liquid. We also found that we added too many berries so it was closer to a fruit smoothie. So we added a little bit of dark cocoa powder. Fixed!
Overall, it took less than 5 minutes. It can be made ahead and refrigerated, or even frozen if you want. It was a nice balance of sweet and still subtly satisfying.
And it’s absolutely perfect after tackling today’s fitblendr Daily Challenge – just saying…
