Breakfast
Chocolate cherry recovery smoothie
After a hard session or a match. This is the one that tastes like a treat, which is most of why it works.
- Servings
- 1
- Total
- 5 min
- Skill
- Easy
What you need
Ingredients
Making for
1 serving
- Frozen pitted cherries1 cup
- Bananas1 each
- Unsweetened cocoa powder1 tbsp
- Unsweetened almond milk1 cup
- Plain Greek yogurt0.5 cup
- Honey1 tbsp
Quantities scale linearly with servings. Round to the nearest practical amount when shopping.
Steps
- 1
Bloom the cocoa in a splash of warm milk first
Put the tablespoon of cocoa powder in the blender with about 2 tbsp of warm milk and swirl it into a paste before adding anything else. Cocoa powder is stubbornly hydrophobic and dumped onto a cold drink it clumps into dry pockets that survive a full minute of blending.
- 2
The rest of the milk, then cherries, banana, yogurt
The remaining milk, one cup of frozen pitted cherries, half a banana and half a cup of Greek yogurt. Dark cherries and cocoa cover each other well, which is why this tastes like dessert rather than like a health drink.
- 3
Blend 45 seconds
Forty-five seconds. Frozen cherries are firmer than berries and need the time.
0:45
Coach's notes
- Tart cherries have been studied for muscle soreness and the results are mixed and mostly in adult athletes, with modest effects. Treat it as a nice-tasting way to get carbohydrate and fluid in after a session, not as a treatment.
- Unsweetened cocoa powder, not drinking chocolate. Drinking chocolate is mostly sugar and you lose control of the amount.
- Chocolate milk has been a standard recovery drink for years for a simple reason: carbohydrate plus protein plus fluid in something children will finish. This is that, with fruit.
- Frozen pitted cherries save an argument. Fresh cherries with stones are not worth it in a blender.