Cardamom and Tea

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.

two passion fruits, one with just the top sliced off and the other sliced in half

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!

Passion Fruit Smoothie

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Yield: 1 smoothie

Ingredients

1 small ripe* banana
1 1/4 cup [150g] frozen mango chunks
1/3 cup [80g] milk**
1 scoop unflavored*** protein powder (optional)
Pinch of salt
The pulp of 1 medium passion fruit

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Instructions

Place the banana, mango chunks, milk, protein powder (if using), and salt in a blender. Add the protein powder after adding the milk for easier cleanup. Do not yet add the passion fruit pulp.
Blend starting at low speed and gradually increase the speed to high.
Use your blender’s tamper. If your blender does not have a tamper, pause the blending periodically to scrape down the sides, and use a bit more liquid. If you want it to be thinner (which is easier to blend without a tamper), add a bit more milk, 1 to 2 Tbsp at a time, until it blends easily.
Once the smoothie is blended completely, stop blending and add the passion fruit pulp (reserve a small spoonful for the top if you want it to look like the photos). Blend at low speed, just until it combines. This will ensure that the seeds**** don’t break up.
Pour into a glass and enjoy while it’s cold.

Notes

* This smoothie works best with a ripe banana with brown spots (not overripe). If your bananas are on the large side, use half of one.

** Use your favorite milk of choice: cow’s, oat, soy, etc.

*** I prefer unflavored here. Chocolate or vanilla also work in this recipe. Just consider whatever flavor you’re adding and decide whether it would be a welcome addition.

**** I love the seeds, which are delightfully crunchy (and also look cool!). If you don’t like the seeds, here’s how to get rid of them:

If you are using a standard blender, strain the seeds out through a sieve before adding to the blender.
If you are using a high-powered blender (like a Vitamix), you can just add the pulp right in at the beginning and let it run on high speed with everything else. They’ll break down into little bits. If you dislike little bits, go for option 1 and strain ahead of time.

Video note: If you don’t see the video for this post after scrolling up, please disable ad block and try reloading the page.

Here’s how to steam broccoli in the microwave easily, with no plastic, no special equipment, and no sogginess:

The problem: Throwing your broccoli in a bowl, shrink-wrapping the bejesus out of it, and hitting “START” can lead to shriveled, dried-out florets. On the other hand, adding water to the bowl does keep them from getting all raisin-ey in the microwave—but unfortunately water turns half of the florets totally soggy. Gross.

The solution: Just slice the broccoli stalk thinly (you know, the crunchy stem that the florets grow from), place those slices in the bottom of the bowl, top off with a bit of water, and throw the florets on top. The florets are kept aloft by those hearty stalk pieces, which in turn simmer away. The stalk needs a little extra tenderizing, so it’s a win-win!

To summarize the perks of this recipe:

Plastic-free.
Zero special equipment.
Crisp broccoli, never soggy.
Less wastage. The stalk bits are super enjoyable!

Jump to the recipe to hit the ground running, or read on for a bit more background on how to steam broccoli in the microwave.

Why I love this method of microwave-steaming broccoli

Here’s a breakdown of those 4 perks I listed in the intro:

1. It’s plastic-free:

In this BA piece, experts argue that it is important to avoid heating foods in plastic. I do tend to follow this advice in my own kitchen—but I do not have a PhD in public health, so I am not here to tell you what you should do with your plastic wrap.

But if you, like me, want to avoid heating your food in plastic, I’m here to tell you that as a culinary expert, there is absolutely a better way! All you need is a microwave-safe plate that completely covers your microwave-safe bowl. As long as your plate completely covers the bowl, it will trap enough steam inside to properly cook everything.

Note that if you have a particularly heavy bowl and plate situation, it might take an extra 30-60 seconds to cook through. And if you’re used to microwaving with plastic wrap, you may need to go a bit longer than usual. But it really does work.

2. Zero special equipment:

This is thanks to that broccoli stalk technique! I adapted this method from a decades-old episode of Good Eats, and have been cooking my broccoli this way since 2008. In 18 years, it has never failed me!

The one key is that your bowl must actually be bowl-shaped. Don’t use a deep plate or a rectangular storage container. You want the water to have very little surface area, so that none of the florets sink into it.

So do not rush out and buy one of those microwave steamers. In fact, if your serving dish is microwave-safe, you can even go ahead and skip the extra dishes, steaming the broccoli right in the dish you plan to serve in. Just pour off the excess liquid and serve!

3. Crisp broccoli, never soggy:

Thanks to that technique, our florets stay out of hot water.

4. Less wastage

If you’ve been throwing away the stalk pieces because it’s too annoying to have to cook them differently from florets, that ends today! This way of cooking them is definitively not annoying, and everything turns out crisp and green. If you like them even more tender, you can slice them even more thinly.

Note: these photos are actually from an older post about steaming broccoli! For that post, I developed a recipe that would work both ways, for either stovetop or microwave, and I took some photos from a microwaved batch and some from a stovetop batch. They all looked so identical, I now have no idea which photos are from which batch.

But feel free to watch the video in the recipe below if you want a step-by-step of how to steam broccoli in the microwave (as well as video-confirmation that it indeed turns out this bright green and perfect every time).