Xanthan Gum, on the Cheap!
Firstly, hello again. Sorry for that unannounced hiatus; I just fell out of love with blogging for a while. You know how it goes.
Now that the weather is warming up, I’ve been eating many more green smoothies. I especially love a good smoothie after a sweaty run. In the past few weeks, I made an exciting green smoothie discovery. Many of you may have already figured this out, but I was pretty psyched.
My standard green smoothie recipe is the following:
1) Stuff food processor full of as many dark greens (usually spinach) as possible. Blend with a bit of almond milk.
2) Add a tablespoon of almond butter and blend some more.
3) Add a frozen banana, some frozen blueberries, and frozen strawberries and blend once again.
4) Eat too fast and get an ice cream smoothie headache.
A few weeks ago I had a bag of spinach that was on its last legs. It was getting slimy at the bottom, but I figured that the fruit would mask any off tastes, so I tossed it into the food processor.
Lo and behold, my smoothie was creamier, fluffier, and more frozen-yogurt like than usual. “What gives, smoothie?” I thought. And then I remembered reading somewhere that xanthan gum, that crazy-expensive but much-beloved smoothie additive, is a byproduct of the same bacteria that makes spinach slimy. In other words, I stumbled upon a cheap-as-free way to get the effects of xanthan gum without shelling out $15 for 8 ounces of the stuff.
I don’t know if it is actually possible to get the effects of xanthan gum from slimy spinach – this may be wishful thinking. But for now I’m going to claim that I came across an unexpected, money-saving discovery. Woohoo frugality!
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