Fresh Fruit or Frozen Fruit For Your Smoothies

If you’re making fruit smoothies, then you have probably wondered if it matters if you use frozen fruit or fresh fruit. That depends on a few things. Below is a brief discussion about about fresh vs frozen fruit. Why you might sometimes want frozen fruit, and why you sometimes might prefer fresh fruit.

Benefits Of Frozen Fruit In Smoothies

There are a whole bunch of benefits to using frozen fruit in your smoothies. The most obvious one is that you can keep frozen fruit in your freezer for a long time. A container of fresh berries won’t sty very long before they go bad. So it’s much more convenient to use frozen fruit. You can keep a selection of raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, bananas, and all other sorts of frozen fruit on hand in your freezer. It is not really feasible to keep that much fresh fruit on hand unless you are a die hard smoothie maker who is going to make one every single day.

Secondly, frozen berries and fruit make your smoothie cold. You don’t have to add in extra ice. So if you don’t like the extra liquid that ice adds, but do want the cool factor, then frozen is the way to go.

Finally, frozen berries can help keep your blenders blades sharp. Ice is another way to keep the blades sharp, but if you don’t want to use ice, then frozen fruit is a cool option.

Is Fresh Fruit Better for a Smoothie?

The benefit to using fresh fruit is that the fruit is very soft, and so it blends up much easier than frozen fruit. When you are making a smoothie with frozen fruit you have to add something like almond milk, coconut water, or even yogurt in order to help blend it up. With fresh fruit, you can blend up a really fruit dense smoothie without bothering to add too much liquid.

The other benefit to using fresh fruit is that they have the enzymes. Frozen fruit has a lot of vitamins and nutrients but much of the enzymes, and some of the vitamins and antioxidants will not be there. If you’re looking to get the most nutrients, then fresh is the way to go. Frozen fruit is good in a pinch, and you should definitely keep some on hand, but it’s not a substitute for fresh fruit. A good plan would be to get a bag of frozen berries and keep them in your fridge and mix them in with your fresh berries to add a cool touch to your smoothie. This is a good alternative to using ice cubes.

Ideally, nothing beats fresh fruit. But reasonably you can’t expect to keep all of that fresh fruit on hand. So keep what you can and then supplement it with fruit.

Combo Compromise: Fresh and Frozen Fruit in a Smoothie

Another idea that I like to incorporate into my daily routine is to mix frozen and fresh fruit. It’s a great compromise.

The reason I do this is that it can be hard to blend frozen fruit without liquid, but I don’t tend to like to add a lot of water or other liquids when making a smoothie.

So, a great alternative is to take the fresh fruit that you’ve brought, and mix it with out of season frozen fruit that you have brought.

For example. I might buy a fresh pineapple and mix it with some organic frozen berries that I picked up. The fresh pineapple helps the blender break down and crush the frozen berries more easily.

If you are looking to make smoothies with frozen fruit, then you should ready my article on the best blenders for frozen fruit smoothies.