A green smoothie that actually blends in a portable blender
About 5 minutes · 1 bottle (350 ml)
Green smoothies are the recipe most likely to defeat a small blender, and almost always for the same reason: leaves are light, so they ride up the walls of the bottle and never come back down to the blades. Fix the loading order and the problem disappears. This is a spinach, banana and apple smoothie sized for one 350 ml bottle.
Ingredients
- 120 ml cold water
- A packed handful of baby spinach (about 30 g)
- 1 small banana, in thick slices
- Half an apple, in rough chunks, skin on
- Optional: 1 tsp lemon juice
Step by step
- Water first. Pour the cold water into the empty bottle before anything else goes in.
- Pack the spinach. Push the spinach down into the water. Compress it — it takes up far less room than it looks like it will.
- Fruit on top. Add the banana slices and apple chunks over the leaves so the fruit holds them down.
- First cycle. Seat the bottle on the base and double-click to run one 30-second cycle.
- Invert and repeat. Lift the bottle off, turn it upside down once to move anything stuck under the cap back onto the blades, and run a second cycle.
Why leaves misbehave
A blade spinning at the base of a bottle creates a vortex that pulls dense things down and pushes light things out. Spinach is almost all air and water; a handful of it dropped on top of the blades will be flung against the wall in the first second and stay there for the remaining twenty-nine, no matter how fast the motor turns.
The answer is not more power. It is to give the leaves something heavy above them, so that as the vortex forms they are pushed down rather than up. In practice that means water at the bottom, leaves next, and the banana and apple on top holding them in.
Building the bottle
Start with 120 ml of cold water. Pack the spinach in next — you can compress it more than you think, and a loose handful is roughly 30 g. Then add the banana in thick slices and the apple in rough chunks, skin on. The fruit sits over the leaves and acts as a lid on them.
Two-thirds full is again the target. Spinach collapses to almost nothing once it is blended, so a bottle that looks alarmingly full before the cycle will look half empty afterwards. Do not compensate by adding more water at the start; add it at the end if the result is thicker than you want.
Two cycles, not one long one
Double-click to start the 30-second cycle. When it finishes, lift the bottle off the base — the motor stops the instant it comes off, so there is nothing to switch off — turn it upside down once, set it back on, and run a second cycle.
The inversion is the whole trick. It moves whatever has collected under the cap back down onto the blades, and a green smoothie that is grainy after one cycle is usually smooth after that. Beyond two cycles you are warming the drink more than you are improving the texture.
Swapping the greens
Baby spinach is the most forgiving green because the leaf is soft and the stem is short. Kale blends too, but strip the stalks out first — the ribs are fibrous enough to survive a 30-second cycle and you will find them in the last mouthful. Silverbeet behaves like kale.
If you are new to green smoothies, start at about half spinach to half fruit by volume and move the ratio as you like it. The banana is doing most of the work in holding the texture together, so keep it even if you change everything else.
Making it the night before
You can build the bottle the evening before and leave it in the fridge, but leave the water out until the morning. Fruit sitting in water overnight goes soft and the apple browns; dry in the bottle it keeps far better.
If you want it colder without ice, freeze the banana slices on a tray and keep them in a bag. Frozen banana takes the place of ice cubes without costing you any of the 350 ml.
Cleaning up
Spinach leaves a green film on the inside of the bottle that dries fast, so rinse immediately. Warm water, a drop of dish soap and one 30-second cycle clears it.
The base unscrews, so you can rinse the blade side directly rather than fishing a brush past four blades. Dry the two halves separately.