To prepare this delicious carrot strawberry smoothie, you'll need just three simple ingredients: carrots, strawberries, and ginger.
Adding vegetables to fruit smoothies is a great way to boost your daily intake of essential nutrients and to reduce the sugar content of your drink.
Most of the carrot smoothie recipes require a centrifuge to properly extract the carrot juices, as the raw root is too hard to be blended.
While, one hand, this process yields a smooth drink without bits, on the other, it leaves behind many precious fibres.
Therefore, in this recipe, we want to show you how to add carrots to a smoothie without a juicer and just use your trusty blender.
By gently boiling the carrots in little water, they will soften, thus enabling you to blitz them into a smoothie easily.
Although boiling can slightly reduce the fibre content of vegetables, studies have shown how cooking certain foods, like carrots and tomatoes, can actually increase their health benefits.
The beta carotene - the precursor of vitamin A - found in carrots becomes more readily available when the root is cooked. And if you don't boil it for too long, the loss of fibres is very minimal - from 3g to 2.8 g [1, 2].
We paired carrots with strawberries to boost this smoothie with loads of vitamin C and A, important antioxidants that your body needs to replenish every day. Moreover, ginger adds a refreshing zing to this drink and powerful anti-inflammatory benefits too.
A single glass of this berry juice provides two of your 5-a-day and covers your recommended intake for both vitamin A and C, all in just 74 calories. Awesome!