Top tips for tip top smoothies

For a couple of years now I've been making smoothies at home, when the mood takes me. I thought I'd share some of the joy.

A cracking smoothie.

When I first got into making smoothies I leapt head first into the whole idea, making them both days of every weekend and sometimes even before work during the week. They replaced my regular muesli as breakfast. Of course, later the novelty wore off and the difficulty of having ripe fruit on hand all the time, especially in Winter, took its toll.

These days I make them when I get the urge, and when I remember to buy enough fruit in the supermarket, which I guess is the best way. Although we generally have fruit at home we don't so often have the types that make for really good smoothies: melons, tropical fruit like mangoes, luscious berries and cherries.

Here then, my top tips for great smoothies.

• While the most commonly available fruit like apples, pears and oranges are useful in smoothies, they're best thought of as ''basenotes''. They need something layered on top of them to be really interesting.
• The most sure fire basenote fruit is banana. It's hard to go wrong with two or three good ripe bananas.
• The less commonly available fruits like mango, papaya, melon, strawberries, blueberries and cherries make for real interest in a smoothie. It's often a good idea to layer a couple of these, in smaller quantities, on top of a broad basenote like pear or banana.
• Making smoothies is easier in Summer, when there's lots of good quality fruit around, but it's still possible to make some damn good smoothies in Winter. In the UK Winter the shops are full of berries and cherries -- although they're not seasonal locally of course and have been either imported or stored -- and these make for great smoothies.
• Don't get carried away! A few ingedients is usually enough. More than about four, and the tastes start to get too mixed up.
• Really dark fruit like blueberries, strawberries and cherries can easily overpower everything else. Treat them like the hand-picked specialities they are and use them sparingly.


A cracking smoothie waiting to happen.

• Don't use unripe fruit. If bananas aren't ripe they aren't worth using. They're definitely not ripe enough if the skin doesn't peel away cleanly from the fruit. Use something else or wait a day or two and use them then.
• Overripe fruit is fine for smoothies. In fact, smoothies are a great use for those partly blackened bananas that otherwise would get thrown away.
• You can tell how good it'll taste in a smoothie by smelling it. Bananas and melons that don't smell great while still whole won't taste great in a smoothie. I won't buy a melon if it doesn't smell like a melon. Bananas of course will ripen over a few days, but some are grown for looks rather than taste. It's always worth giving them a sniff.
• While mango in general is a good smoothie fruit, try to track down some Pakistani honey mangoes for a real flavour adventure. In the UK they're only available in summer, when they're sold in Indian areas like Alperton near Wembley. At the height of summer you can hardly walk down Alperton high street for honey mango salesmen, then suddenly a few weeks later they're gone. They sell them in boxes, usually for pretty good money. Expect to pay around seven quid for a box of six large mangoes. Delightfully, the boxes come decorated with strands of tinsel.
• Peeling and stoning fruit can seem like hard work. But there are time-saving tricks for most of the real hardball cases. For cherries, try cutting right around them with a sharp knife -- rolling them on under the knife on a chopping board works best -- then twist the halves apart in your fingers to separate. Unfortunately the stone stays embedded in one of the halves, and that still has to be dug out by hand -- let me know if you know a better way. The same approach works for avocados, by the way.
• For mangoes, you can buy specialized mango stone removers. My mom, a bit of a smoothie fan herself, introduced me to these. They work a bit like olive pitters, slicing an elliptical hole right through the mango from top to bottom and removing the stone in the process. Once the stone is out and the flesh is in two halves, you can get the flesh off the skin easily by scoring the flesh in a checkerboard pattern with a knife and then removing the cube-shaped checks one at a time.
• Yoghurt does work well in a smoothy. I prefer to use yoghurts that aren't too heavily flavoured or sweetened. But that's just me.
• A little bit of water helps to get things moving in the blender, and makes the smoothie, which otherwise can actually be too rich, go a lot further in the glass. Fruit is a highly concentrated source of energy and sugar and there's nothing wrong with diluting it a bit.
• Surprise ingredients include dates, pecan nuts and honey. You don't need much to add a bit of extra zing.