You’ve heard all there is to hear about the new ‘megaberry’. The acai, pronounced “ah-sigh-ee” is the great super food coming out of the deepest darkest Amazon basin in Brazil. You’ve seen it hyped on the Oprah Winfrey show as the richest natural source of antioxidants in the world. The New York Times will tell you that it is a little gem of a berry loaded with amino acids and all the right kinds of unsaturated fat. Everybody will tell you how great the acai berry is for your health and how if Dorian Grey had taken it daily he wouldn’t need that old junk portrait in the attic. However very few people are telling how to get hold of the acai berry.
You see the acai berry is 90% pip-stone (which is inedible) and the juicy pulp is up to half constituted of fat. Unfortunately this high fat content pulp means that it goes way off very quickly once ripe and picked. What they don’t tell you is that the very best way to consume this fruit is to go to Brazil for both of the harvest seasons and eat them direct from the tree. Acai berries decay in under 24hours after being picked. They’ll never tell you that you will see truck loads of acai berries bringing their cargoes of goodness to a store near you.
What we can tell you is that fresh acai berries are not a realistic option outside of Brazil but frozen acai pulp definitely is. There is a company called Sambazon, the first and still the best producers and distributors of acai have this excellent quick freeze method for preserving acai pulp straight from the plantations. So now we can also tell you that acai sorbet can be enjoyed in juices, smoothies and ice cream at an outlet near you.
So what can we tell you if you want a version of acai that isn’t frozen or in an ice cream? What if you want it in pill form so you can get the benefits while working out at the gym or sitting at your desk? We can tell you that Sambazon do this too. We can tell you that Sambazon call it a ‘freeze dried super food’ and it is nature made convenient for the modern World. In fact we can tell you in all honesty that acai powder is an improvement on nature because it is concentrated antioxidants and amino acids minus the water.
And here is the most telling statistic of all when it comes to getting into acai berries. For every 100 grams of fresh acai the ORAC score is 5,500 while for acai powder it is 50,000. Just in case you didn’t know let us tell you that the ORAC score stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, a scientific test that measures the antioxidant concentration in foodstuffs. What did we tell you? This acai stuff is great!
