Chicha Morada, cool and healthy stuff from Peru!

This intense purple drink is the ultimate refreshing drink for this summer! One of its key ingredients is purple corn, which intense color is caused by the many flavonoids and antioxidants it contains. In fact purple corn contains more antioxidants than blueberries. Unsurprisingly, purple corn is regarded as a Super Food!

I can imagine you have never heard about purple corn, like me, up until a few weeks ago. At the local Farmer’s market held every year in June in my village (which literally starts around the corner) I found this nice woman. She originally comes from Peru, but turns out to live in the next village! She sold lovely spices and other nice Peruvian stuff among which this dried purple corn.

I asked her what it was and what you can do with it. So she gave me the recipe to this lovely drink, which you can also make with the purple corn in powder form. I rushed home to try it at once!

Luckily my pantry contained the other necessary ingredients being: the peel of a large pineapple, peels of Granny Smith Apples, fresh lemon juice, coconut sugar, cinnamon stick and cloves.

And then all it takes is water and time! It needs a boiling time of in total 1,5 hours.

In the meantime you can make a nice smoothie of the fresh pineapple flesh which remains after peeling of the skin. In this case combined with fresh mango.

And the inside of the Granny Smith’s ended up in my apple crumble. It goes without saying that nothing goes to waiste.

Maybe 1,5 hour sounds like a long time, but you will end up with a couple of bottles of fresh, super healthy juice for the whole family to benefit from and it wil last you a couple of days. So it is definitely more than worth the effort!

Now all we need is that summer warmth……