Vanilla and orange juice taste like a creamsicle. That is not a discovery, it is just what those two things do together. The blueberries turn it purple and make it thick enough to feel like food instead of a drink.
Five things, a pot and a cup. Most of the time is the gelatin blooming, which you spend doing something else. A simple, quick meal I added to help me stay full during the morning rush.
Ingredients
- 8 oz orange juice (Kirkland)
- 8 oz ultra filtered 2% milk (Kirkland Signature)
- 34.3 g French vanilla whey, about one scoop (Transparent Labs)
- 12 g beef gelatin (Great Lakes Wellness)
- 140 g frozen blueberries (Kirkland)
Method
A pot, a tall cup and an immersion blender. The gelatin is the reason the pot is involved.
- Stir the 12 g of gelatin into the cold milk and leave it 5 to 10 minutes. It swells and goes grainy. That is blooming, and it is supposed to look like that.
- Pour it into a small pot and bring it up to a simmer, stirring, until the grain is gone and the milk is smooth again.
- Frozen blueberries and orange juice into the tall cup. Pour the hot milk over them. The frozen fruit takes the temperature back down almost immediately.
- Whey in last, once it is no longer steaming. Whey goes grainy in hot liquid, so it waits for the berries to do their job.
- Immersion blender, head all the way under before you switch it on. 45 to 60 seconds, moving up and down, until no blue flecks are moving.
- Let it sit 5 to 10 minutes, then eat it. The gelatin firms it up to about pudding in that window. That is the texture you want, not a mistake.
Notes
Frozen blueberries are doing the work here. Fresh ones plus ice is a thinner, more watery drink, and you can taste the difference immediately.
The milk matters more than it looks like it should. Ultra filtered 2% is 13 g of protein per 8 oz where regular 2% is about 8 g, so swapping it takes this from 53 g to somewhere near 48 g. Same drink, five grams quieter.
The gelatin is unflavored, so the vanilla whey is what you actually taste.
The green Great Lakes tub is beef gelatin, not collagen peptides, and that is the whole reason for the bloom and the pot. Peptides dissolve in cold liquid and you can shake them into anything. Gelatin will not. Dump it straight into something cold and you get clumps that never open up. Bloom it, heat it, and it disappears.
The other half of that: gelatin sets as it cools, and how long you wait decides what you are eating. Five to ten minutes on the counter gets it to pudding, which is the version I like. The fridge takes it well past that. I tried it, it came back as jello, and I hated it.
So this is a make-it-and-eat-it recipe, not a night-before one. If you want something waiting for you in the morning, that is the peptides tub, not this.