Acai Berry Recipes Inspired by Rachel Ray
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.
My most popular dish at home is a baked chicken breast with a spicy citrus marinade, so I thought perhaps I could invent a chicken dish with acai berry juice substituted in for one of the citrus juices I normally use. As long as I kept my marinade time the same as usual (at least 6 hours in the refrigerator), I thought I couldn’t go wrong trying out a citrus acai marinade.
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.
Surely Rachel Ray would use acai more sensibly! The next recipe I tried was acai frozen yogurt and it was a much bigger success. I added acai berry juice to plain low fat yogurt. I poured the mixture into a screened drainer lined with two layers of cheese cloth. I then left the mixture in the fridge to drip into a bowl for 24 hours. After 24 hours the yogurt was the texture of cream cheese. It was perfect to spread on bagels or crackers 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.
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