Passion Fruit Smoothie

Whether you love passion fruit seeds (🙋🏽‍♀️) or hate them, this passion fruit smoothie recipe has you covered:

• For the seed haters, it’s a pretty straightforward process: You can strain them out in the beginning. Or if you have a high-powered blender, you can blend on high until they break down into little bits. Easy!
• For the seed lovers, it just takes one trick. If we just add all the ingredients in the beginning, our beautiful passion fruit seeds are going to pulverize (nooo!). The solution? Blend all your other ingredients together on high first. Then add the passion fruit right at the end, blending on low speed just to combine.

What else do I love about this recipe?

Well, any good passion fruit smoothie will include a few milder tropical fruits to carry the passion fruit’s flavor. It’s all about striking the right balance of creaminess and punchiness. In this recipe, banana, frozen mango, and your milk of choice round everything out perfectly, but plenty of passion fruit flavor still comes through. Passion fruit is the dominant note, but it’s not too acidic. It’s just an absolute delight.

Jump to the recipe to hit the ground running, or read on for a few recipe notes and to learn the best way to open a passion fruit.

The best way to open a passion fruit

Sounds totally obvious, but you might just be opening passion fruits inefficiently! At least, I had been doing so for years until my friend Renate showed me the easiest way to do it:

Instead of slicing them down the middle, slice the top off instead.

Either way works, but popping the top off is a much less messy process (see above photos). If you’ve got a particularly ripe passion fruit, the juices will ooze everywhere when you cut it in half. Popping the top off keeps everything in one place. You just scoop it out with a spoon right into the blender. No muss, no fuss!

A few notes about this smoothie:

1) The order you add ingredients matters.

If you add the passion fruit pulp in the beginning, the seeds will break down and pulverize. Maybe that’s what you want, but just be aware.

Also be sure to add protein powder after you add the milk/alternative milk. This goes for any smoothie, and makes cleanup way easier. If you add the powder first, it can gunk up the blade area, which is the hardest part to clean. If it gets really gunky, running the blender with soapy water won’t even save you. I had to take mine completely apart once.

My favorite new year’s resolution I made in 2024 was “liquid first, then protein powder.” Life changing.

2) Can you use fresh mango and frozen banana?

The recipe calls for frozen mango and a countertop banana, but you can use almost any combination of frozen or fresh. Just try to make sure at least one of them is frozen, otherwise your smoothie will not have the right chilled temperature and semi-frozen texture.

Adding both frozen mango and frozen banana will give your smoothie a more nice-cream-like texture, which can be really good, but it is a bit harder on your average blender. You really need something like a Vitamix to do the job (and you for sure need a tamper), and you may need to thin it out with a bit more milk. You should also stick to a single batch in that case, rather than doubling it.

3) How to wash your blender:

We’ve all heard the hack about adding soapy water to your blender and running it on high for a minute or two. But honestly, I’ve never found that to 100% do the job.

It does a good job of the area around the blades, which is the most dangerous and most difficult to clean. So that’s great. But here’s what I do with the rest of it:

Do the whole soapy water on high thing with it covered. Then take the blender off the base and move it to the sink. Do not ever put your hand in a blender while it could turn on. Grab a paper towel (not a sponge, which doesn’t get into the ridges as well). Give the inside walls of the blender a few swipes with the paper towel to get any gunky protein powder residue. And rinse!

4) How to make 1 serving or 2 servings:

The recipe in this post will yield 1 smallish passion fruit smoothie (but as you can see, there are a lot of ingredients in there, so it’s actually pretty filling as a snack). The video in the recipe card shows 1 single serving.

The photos in this post show a double-batch (because a single serving does not photograph well and looks kind of sad lol). If you want to make 2 passion fruit smoothies, a single batch is really easy to scale up:

• 2 bananas
• 2 1/2 cups frozen mango
• 2/3 cup milk
• 2 scoops protein powder
• A big pinch salt
• The pulp of 2 passion fruits

5) Straws or spoons?

This is for sure a spoon smoothie, not a straw smoothie—unless you have boba straws on hand, in which case, go for it! With your average straw, the passion fruit seeds will clog it up instantly.

I accidentally used a regular straw once (you can actually see said straw in a 1-second clip in the video at the end of the recipe below), so I know from experience (cringe). Looks cute, doesn’t work. Worth it though to skip the straw for those gorgeously crunchy passion fruit seeds!

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