Great Green Globs

If you know me, you know I'm a juice drinker. I'm genuinely shocked when anyone tells me they don't drink a lot of juice, so highly do I regard its taste and nutritive value. Like any committed juice drinker, I love to treat myself to a smoothie from time to time (by which I mean several times a week, if possible), and I'm too busy/lazy to make them myself. So, in the world of commercially available smoothies, there are three ways you can go:

1. Juice Bars and Smoothie places are the best (Jamba Juice, Robex, lots of independent places, Whole foods in SRQ has a pretty nice juice bar...) they take fresh ingredients, add healthy "boosts" to your specifications (protein powder, multi vitamin, etc) and blend it for you with ice and milk or whatever. Totally yummy, and lots of healthy stuff (probably a lot of sugar and calories too, but it feels healthy, and that's what matters to me), however at $4-6 per smoothie, this is not economically sound as a daily drink.
2. Non-juice bar blended smoothies are pretty much a scam. You can get these at fast-food places and school cafeterias. Basically they take sweetened fruit concentrate syrup and mix it up with crushed ice, resulting in a sort of fruit slurpee. These are refreshing in a pinch, but too sweet to really feel at all healthy or natural. And I'm sure the sugar content is through the roof.
3. Bottled juice smoothies are actually better than one might think (not quite as fancy as fresh-blended juice bar smoothies, but much nicer than the fast-food variety) and are widely available. Grocery stores, 7-11s, gas stations, pretty much any place that sells individually bottles drinks sells bottled smoothies. The three brands that dominate the market are Odwalla, Naked Juice, and Bolthouse Farms.

My mission today is to examine the third option. Each brand has its strengths and weaknesses (Bolthouse Farms coffeemocha protein shake, while not really a smoothie, is the tastiest protein beverage around) but I thought I'd pick one type of smoothie and compare across all three labels. I've chosen the green smoothie because I love it, it's the health-food-iest of the bunch, and because I think often people are needlessly frightened by the color. I will award up to 10 points for taste, 5 points for nutritious content, and 5 points for package design.

1. Odwalla "Original Superfood" - Despite the dark green color, probably from the 2000 mg of spirulina, this has a very traditional smoothie taste, with a little bit of a bite. With the primary ingredients being apple, peach, mango, strawberry and banana you're sort of overwhelmed by the fruity-ness of it, while the green stuff, wheat and barley grass, sprouts and jerusalem artichoke, not to mention the spirulina, tries to slip by undetected. The resulting flavor is complex, perhaps too complex. The fruits and the greens feel like separate elements that never quite come together to form one flavor pallette. It's not like it tastes bad, but it's not my favorite. And while those green ingredients sound pretty impressive, when you check the nutrition info, it doesn't add up to as much as you might think (20% of your recommended daily intake of Vitamin C, 20% Iodine, 8% Iron, 2% Calcium). I'm hesitant to harsh on the packaging because the Odwalla look is such a big part of the bottled juice industry, but while I like the bright colors and swirly cartoon graphics, I wonder if people who come to this drink as adults might think it looks to juvenile, and that's already kind of a problem for juice... Points awarded: Taste- 7, Health- 2, Design- 3; Total 12/20
2. Bolthouse Farms "Green Goodness"- Definitely has a very earthy taste. Boasting 1500mg of spirulina, as well as chlorella, green tea, broccoli, spinach, barley and wheat grass, bluegreen algae, echinacea, garlic, and a bunch of other healthy stuff, Bolthouse Farms does not hide its greens under a bushel. The apple, banana, kiwi and pineapple work with, rather than against their darker counter parts, but do nothing to shield the drinker from what's going on; this is good for you, and you know it. The taste is still better than a non-green juice drinker might expect, but only by a little. The vitamin content is fantastic (over %100 daily value for Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Zinc and Magnese) and you feel good after drinking it. The packaging is age neutral, equally appealing to organic-happy moms, and old ladies in farm houses, but the over-all appearance is very subdued and doesn't call attention to itself. I also find it difficult to imagine a man buying or drinking from this container. Points awarded: Taste- 4, Health- 5, Design- 2; Total 11/20
3. Naked Juice "Green Machine" - I love this drink. In the interest of full disclosure you should know that when I'm not doing taste tests for my blog, "Green Machine" is the only green smoothie I buy. The taste is so satisfying, you feel like kiwi and bluegreen algae were made for each other. The fruits and the greens come together to form one yummy, healthy whole, with no pond-like after taste. The ingredients stack up pretty much like the other two (but with slightly less Spirulina, no jerusalem artichoke, and added ginger and parsley), and the vitamin/mineral content pretty much splits the difference between odwalla and bolthouse. Appearance-wise, it's hard to look past a word like "naked" when you see it on a juice bottle, and if you pick it up and take a closer look you'll find an easy to read list of the fruits and "boosts" in the mix, as well as a cute little dialogue about how weird it looks as compared to how good it tastes. And even though young-ish ladies probably make up most of the smoothie buying market, nothing about this bottle is particularly feminine or childlike. Points Awarded: Taste-10, Health- 3, Design- 5; Total 18/20!!!

I hope everyone found this informative, because I am now so sloshy with green juice that I'm likely to sprout leaves any second. If anybody questions my methodology based on the fact that this was a one person study, and only confirmed that my favorite was the best... well, you can get your own blog and do your own juice tasting. Or just send me some feedback, and let me know your green smoothie thoughts; I love a good beverage debate!

Happy juicing!

Java Jive

I just drank a cherry flavored latte. I'm aware that the very thought of this will turn most of your stomachs (the reality of it didn't do mine any favors), but if I take you through my journey, perhaps you'll understand...

Let us turn our minds back to the middle years of this nameless decade, when I was still a Sarasota girl, traipsing fancily across five points park on my daily journey from Starbucks to the Golden Apple, 5 shot raspberry iced white mocha latte in hand. Each pinkish sip was a transcendent pleasure, the tartness of the raspberry meeting the rich darkness of the espresso, sweetened by the white chocolate syrup, and tempered by the milk... the satisfaction was indescribable. But tragically, nothing that perfect is meant to last, and in early 2007 Starbucks changed their formula for raspberry syrup, renaming it "juicy raspberry" and making it redder, sweeter, and thicker. I tried to go on as if nothing had changed, sipping away, attempting to overcome the sugary taste of the syrup by adding a 6th shot of espresso... but the gooey clumps of juicy raspberry would stick in my throat, chocking me with their perversion of all that I had once adored. The baristas offered their condolences, but there was nothing they could do. The Starbucks over lords had made their choice, and we all had to live with it. I began ordering an unadorned white mocha, and tried to move on with my life.

Much has changed since those days. I finished college and left home, trading in my ritual daily jaunt through five points for a tense commute through the obstacle course of Los Angeles traffic, and these days when I order my iced white mocha, my longing for the raspberry of yore is but a distant memory. Or it was until my dear friend Adelaide casually mentioned on the phone last night that she'd tasted something that reminded her of "that pink coffee" I used to drink. Suddenly my long-buried desire came flooding back, and I was once again reeling, desperate to recreate the satisfaction of the latte-that-was.

I was struck by an idea: The Coffee Bean! For those of you outside of LA "The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf" is a local chain that's ubiquitous as Starbucks in these parts (and apparently now has locations in other areas as well). I have some issues with their white mocha lattes in general, because they're flavored with a powder rather than a syrup. In theory this isn't a bad idea, as it prevents that cloying sweetness that comes when a barista gets overly enthusiastic with the flavor pump, but it tragically leaves you vulnerable to the even less appealing problem of un-mixed lumps of powder. I'm also pretty sure that their large is smaller than a venti, but I don't have data to back me up.

Anyway, it occurred to me that since I don't normally drink there I'm not super familiar with their flavors and extras, and I indulged myself in the fantasy that maybe they had a raspberry syrup of their own. But my hopes were dashed when I went after work, and discovered upon a thorough examination of their menu that they don't even come close to starbucks in terms of customizable options (chocolate, vanilla and caramel were pretty much the only a la carte accoutrements). But there I was, determined to have a taste adventure. I told the barista that I wanted something new and different to add to my white mocha latte, and that I had no qualms about oddness. Some of her co-workers got in on the action, and together we decided to add a generous splash of the juice from a jar of cherries into their usual white chocolate concoction.

I can't claim to have enjoyed the resulting beverage, exactly. It was overwhelmingly sweet, and not the most natural of flavor combinations, but the look of the rosy brown liquid swirling around the ice in my plastic cup did give me a nostalgic twinge of pleasure. If there is a lesson to all of this, I suppose it's that you can't recreate the past. I'm in a very different place now than I was three years ago, both practically and emotionally, and no amount of artificial flavoring can make things as they were. But now that this flurry of caffeinated reminiscence has past, I can return to the business of embracing my life as it is, in a city that's infinitely more complicated, with a latte that's decidedly simpler.