It’s difficult to find acai berry recipes. I’m a big fan of Rachel Ray, and she recently featured the acai berry on one of her shows, so I thought for sure that I could find some Rachel Ray acai berry recipes online. But after a few days of searching, I decided that I should just start inventing some of my own.
The first thing I tried was an acai berry juice marinade on chicken breast. This is just a variation of an orange juice and white pepper marinade I picked up in Nicaragua or the lime juice and soy marinade I had been using for years. I should note that I always marinade for at least six hours as any less time doesn’t do much for me.
I start by halving the chicken breasts because I find that being able to cook smaller pieces for less time on the barbeque decreases the chance that I will overcook or dry out the meat. Add all the chicken to a glass bowl, and add cold pressed olive oil, some ground sea salt, ground white pepper, minced garlic, acai berry juice, and lime juice as the citrus flavor. I thought the sour lime would balance the sweetness of the acai berry juice. As it turns out, the chicken turned out quite well, but not quite as good as by normal marinade. I also doubted that very much of the acai goodness made it into the chicken, as most of the sauce is burned off or dripped in the bar-b-q any way.
So my next recipe was a variation on another favorite of mine, and I hoped it would turn out better than the chicken experiment. In fact it did meet with very positive reviews. This is my own version of acai berry frozen yogurt. Mix acai berry juice with a non-flavored low fat yogurt. Then set a strainer and cheese cloth in a bowl, pour through the yogurt, put it in the fridge and let it drain through the yogurt for a day. Once the yogurt has drained, you are left with a cream cheese like mixture, which in fact is quite good as a spread or dip at this point.
I pealed the acai/yogurt mixture off the cheese cloth and into some Tupperware. I then froze the mixture for 8 hours. It was delicious! It was tangy from the yogurt and had the rich berry taste of acai. The amount of freezing depends on how you like to have your frozen yogurt. I prefer it softer rather than harder and therefore 8 hours worked well for me.
The last and most obvious recipe was an acai berry smoothie. I added ice, two frozen bananas, some plain low fat yogurt, and 1.5 cups of acai berry juice to the blender. Predictably, it was excellent. Smoothie recipes are almost fool proof. Don’t forget to add a little wheat germ to smoothies to add some invisible protein and fibre to your smoothie recipes.
So as you can see, it’s not all that hard to find some interesting dishes to make with acai, so you can get the health benefits from this very popular new super food. As you can see, I was able to make a breakfast (the smoothie), snack and main dish all using acai berry. Maybe I should write in to Rachel Ray and see if she has any actual recipe ideas. Until then, I’ll just keep experimenting.
