Acai Berry Recipes

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.

One of the best things I can think of to do with different juices is to make a chicken marinade. The best recipe I have is one I learned in Central America, and is a combination of citrus juices, garlic, white pepper, a little sea salt, and some chicken stock. Occasionally I add some soy sauce or Bragg, but with my acai berry version I’m going to leave that out.

I generally butterfly chicken breasts so I can reduce cooking time, lessening the chance that I will overcook and dry them out. I should also note that this citrus recipe works best if you bar-b-q or cook your chicken on an open grill. I use a pyrex dish to add all the ingredients to marinate the chicken. I would normally add the juice of 2 oranges, but for this recipe I’m adding juice from one orange, 1/2 cup of acai berry juice, juice of one lime, 4-8 cloves of garlic, 1/2 t white pepper, 1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil, and a little ground sea salt. Well, after it I marinated overnight, and bar-b-q’ed the pollo, the consensus was that although the acai version was tasty, the original recipe was still the best marinade. Well, perhaps that’s for the best, acai berry is pretty expensive to have most of it burn off or drip down onto the coals.

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 continued with the frozen yogurt recipe and peeled the creamy acai berry yogurt from the cheesecloth into a plastic container. Whip the yogurt with a whisk for several minutes to lighten it up, and then throw it in the freezer. After 8 hours it should be frozen enough to try. I just loved this recipe! It was a perfect mixture of the acai berry juice and frozen yogurt so that it wasn’t overly sweet like ice cream would be. I think a good variation would be to put the yogurt mixture into Popsicle cups so you have individual servings ready to eat on the go.

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.

With a little imagination acai can be incorporated into many different recipes. Without much thought I was able to create a main course, desert and a smoothie. Although Rachel Ray acai berry recipes do not seem to currently exist I will continue looking and in the meantime I will be creating and writing about my own recipes.