Beet and Apple Breakfast Smoothie

On a hot summer’s morning, drink beet and apple juice for a cool, calming and satisfying breakfast.

Beet and apple juice make a filling summer’s breakfast. This gorgeous breakfast smoothie is made of beet, apple, swiss chard, parsley, fresh-squeezed lemon juice and coconut water! Vegetables and fruits are blitzed in the blender carafe for a powerhouse libation to start your day.

Bridging the flavors of beet and apple?

You can combine beet and apple — a root and a tree-fruit, successfully in one drink. Ayurveda recommends highly-colored foods and the combination of tastes in one meal. When tastes seem at odds, often a “bridge” fruit or vegetable provides the connection called for with opposite tastes. Here, we add lemon juice to bridge flavors. Read more about Ayurveda in Acharya Shunya’s book.

Apple is naturally sweet, and pairs well with a beet’s crisp-sweet taste.

What’s so special about beetroot? If you buy it fresh, a beetroot is tender and ever-so-slightly sweet. Its flesh is dripping with deep magenta-red pigment, which in Chinese medicine might translate to blood-building advantages—especially helpful for vegan and vegetarian eaters. But every type of eater benefits from beets!

Beets are calming in summer’s heat—something you might not expect from a root vegetable. Eating raw beets can underscore the energetic qualities and enzymes or prebiotics in the root. In fact, they are pro-digestive and helpful for your abdominal health. Your skin benefits, therefore, as well.

The idea for a beetroot and apple juice smoothie comes from Kate O’Donnell’s recipe for “the beet queen” in her “Everyday Ayurveda Cookbook” where she’s chosen a combination of tastes best suited to summer season, to keeping cool and comfortable in spite of the temperatures.

Kate’s advice for the hot season includes breakfast fare such as pearled barley cooked in coconut milk. And her summer shopping list focuses on apples, berries, dates, melons, peaches and plums for the fruits. Beets, corn, cucumber, fennel, lettuce, summer squashes, zucchini and herbs—parsley, cilantro, thyme, basil, mint and dill—are the vegetables of choice for heat.

Beetroot and apple fruit with greens turn out to be delightful pairings! Our story here is that organic Fuji apple, ripe and juicy, met a tender and fresh beet and made a match of deliciousness together! I hadn’t expected such a joyful combination.

Make a beetroot and apple juice smoothie

First, gather your ingredients. You’ll need 1 small beet, 1 medium apple, a generous handful of swiss chard, a small handful of parsley, fresh-squeezed lemon juice from 1 lemon, and a cup of coconut water.

Method:

Peel and chop the beet and apple into small pieces, and chop the greens. Squeeze the lemon juice into a small bowl.

Place coconut water into the blender carafe and pour in the beet, apple, swiss chard and parsley pieces. Pour the fresh-squeezed lemon juice on top. Then set your blender to medium, chop everything into a slurry, then blend on high until smooth.
 

There will be considerable pulp! My blender has only so much power, and after setting the “pulverize” button, my smoothies still come out pretty chunky. In this recipe, I needed to strain out some of the pulp. It was easy to do with a small mesh-type strainer and a spoon to help press the liquid from the pulp. Save some of the pulp for another use—it could go into soup, for example, for lovely color and flavor.
 

Pour into glasses and serve!

Combine greens with beet, apple, and lemon juice and you arrive at a kitchen favorite borrowed from Mediterranean cooking. The flavor-enhancing astringent taste of lemon juice draws this recipe into a lip-smacking good breakfast. In one drink you have sweet from the apple, sour from lemon juice, salty from parsley leaves, bitter from swiss chard, and astringent, also from lemon and swiss chard.

See Kate O’Donnell’s recipes for seasonal drinks, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and treats in “The Everyday Ayurveda Cookbook” published by Shambhala Publications, 2015. Her book includes Ayurvedic basic philosophy behind food and eating as well as lifestyle choices and cleansing.

More summer drinks, with cucumber and mint, and one with pineapple and bitter greens, here.

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