Enter Ricera – an organic brown rice yogurt claims to be: “One-and-a-half servings of Whole Grain Rice per cup; Casein Free, Soy Free, Wheat and Gluten Free.” A friend of mine had told me about rice yogurts, but since she’s a full blown dairy addict, she’d never tried any. So last week at Whole Foods I sought out as many non-dairy yogurts as I could. Soy, Rice and Coconut versions made it home with me (this is the first one I’ve tried).
I must admit that even before going casein free, I didn’t eat regular dairy yogurt right out of the container. Just not much of a fan of the texture. So I didn’t try this Ricera yogurt just with a spoon by itself – that would create an unfair predisposition to dislike the resultant smoothie since I just plain old don’t like to eat yogurt like that.
So I happily plopped my frozen banana, frozen pineapple, container of Blueberry Ricera and a shot of orange juice in the blender and blended away. The texture came out just right: thick and creamy, not too chunky or runny. The color was just slightly off putting: it somehow took on a brownish hue. But it had little flecks of “it’s okay, I’m blueberry!” blue in it, so our five-year old son was appeased enough to try it. And when we did: yum! It’s actually good!
There’s a slight chalky aftertaste somehow (very, very minor), but it’s not bad at all. We all drank the whole serving of our new breakfast smoothie – and in doing so got more than 20% of our daily calcium as well as some potassium and Vitamin D. Awesome!
So in case you’d like to try our new GFCF Breakfast Smoothie concoction, here’s a recipe:
1 Container Ricera Blueberry Yogurt I haven’t tried any other flavors yet, but I will and then I’ll report back…
1/2 banana, sliced & frozen (I buy bunches of organic when they go on sale – they just taste better – and slice them all, lay two bananas-worth of slices flat in freezer bags so I know that there are four fruit servings per bag)
1/2 cup frozen pineapple (about 6 chunks)
Splash of orange juice (I use Simple Orange plus Calcium – always looking for ways to get our daily calcium in!)
Throw it all in a blender and let the little ones have a blast pulsing and blending until it’s a smooth, drinkable texture.