Vegan Mate Green Tea Fruit and Nut Parfait Recipe
Vegan Mate Green Tea Fruit and Nut Parfait Recipe
A healthy breakfast is no joke. Finding a meal that gives you the energy and drive to make it through those morning meetings and get you to lunchtime without an energy slump is a huge deal.
We’ve created this parfait recipe to do just that. This modern remodel of the classic sugary sweet, granola-laden cafe standard swaps out sugar for stevia to help manage blood sugar and glucose levels.
Next, this recipe swaps out high caloric and fast-burning sweetened granola for protein and healthy fat-packed cashews. Finally, this recipe uses vegan yogurt, which is lower in sugar and full of omega-3s and healthy fatty acids.
We’ve added in a stevia-sweetened concentrate of our Awake Herbal Wellness tea. This tea is an antioxidant-rich blend of spearmint and yerba mate which will add a lovely little energy boost and delicious depth of flavor to your morning parfait.
Why Parfait?
We’ve all seen the gorgeous breakfast bowl trend on Instagram. Beautiful bowls of yogurt and granola with bright and exotic fruit purees. However, sometimes it’s good to head back to the tried and true for inspiration and on-the-go healthy deliciousness.
Breakfast bowls are incredibly versatile and beautiful. Parfaits are the old-school, classic breakfast bowl. It has similar ingredients but in an easy-to-transport vertical vessel.
However, this old-school layered delight takes the cake on usability. It can be super challenging to enjoy a big heavy bowl of fruit, granola, and yogurt at a red light, but parfaits make light of that task creating a classic and delicious on-the-go experience.
Balancing Protein and Energy at Breakfast with Yogurt
Yogurt is one of those foods that gets little praise as a health food. Filled with healthy and hardworking probiotics and proteins, yogurt, especially the vegan variety, is made to be the perfect breakfast food.
Our first meal of the day needs to be nutrient and protein-packed, so our body has the fuel it needs to sustain us until lunchtime.
With so many yogurt varieties on the market, it's hard to choose the best one. Your best bet is sticking to brands without added thickeners and sugar.
With vegan yogurts, each different plant-based milk has a slew of excellent health benefits from fatty acids and omega-3s but is on the lower side with protein content. Cashew yogurt has the most protein but is harder to find at a reasonable price, especially in small towns.
We included the crushed cashews as an alternative to grain and sugar-filled granola and as a way to add in that extra protein that some vegan yogurts lack. These cashews will give you the added protein boost you need while helping you feel full and satisfied till lunch rolls around.
History of Yerba Mate
What is yerba mate? Yerba mate is a tea blend that contains the naturally caffeine-rich leaves and twigs of a native South American holly tree. Also known as Ilex paraguariensis.
Traditionally, mate is served with hot, not quite boiling, water being poured over the dried ground leaves in a traditional mate gourd and enjoyed through a special mate straw known as a bombilla. The bombilla is inserted in the gourd at the same time as the tea.
With a traditional mate, it is brewed slowly with just under boiling water added a little bit to ensure that all the flavors develop at the same time and enjoy the sipping process even longer.
Mate was traditionally a communal experience. A group leader would be in charge of adding more water as the gourd is passed through the group while the group enjoyed organic conversation.
Yerba mate contains powerful and healthful compounds:
- Caffeoyl derivatives — These are where mate gets its substantial antioxidant boost.
- Caffeine, theophylline, and theobromine — All-natural stimulants found in teas, coffee, and even chocolate. These stimulants give your brain a boost of energy and provide that clean awake feeling you receive from green tea.
- Saponins — Are phytochemicals with anti-inflammatory, anti-carcinogenic, and anti-microbial properties and can reduce tumor growth and help lower cholesterol.
Spearmint Medicinal Uses and History
Spearmint is one of those common garden herbs that has been used in one way or another in daily health for centuries and in cultures all over the world. Whether used in toothpaste, mouthwash or used in folklore tinctures to aid in digestion or look back to ancient Roman times, spearmint was commonly worn as a scent on the arms and was also used in funerary rites.
For centuries, mint has been used for both its aromatic properties as well as its soothing medicinal properties.
Mint varieties are one of the oldest cultivated herbs and are definitely one of the oldest documented cultivated herbs. One of the oldest medical texts from 1550 BC suggests that mint could be used as a mint digestive tincture to help reduce flatulence.
Delicious and Good For Digestion
Mint varieties—specifically spearmint—are excellent digestive aids. Mint leaves are chock-full of carvones that are natural compounds that, through studies, have shown to help stave off severe stomach contractions and bloating, definitely assisting in that age-old flatulence problem those folks from 1550 BC were facing.
Spearmint is not only good for digestion. It is also good for cellular health. Like many of its herby brethren, it is also filled with antioxidants that aid in fighting off free radicals that help heal damaged cells from conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer.
Studies have also shown the spearmint can aid in helping to normalize hormonal imbalances in women.
Vegan Mate Green Tea and Fruit Parfait Recipe
Prep time: 10/15 minutes
Cook time: 10 minutes
Yields: 2 servings + concentrate for several more servings
Course: Breakfast
Ingredients
- Two tablespoons Awake Herbal Wellness Tea
- 4 ounces of boiled water
- Vegan Yogurt
- Crushed cashews
- Stevia cubes or Stevia in the Raw
- A fresh banana, thinly sliced
- Fresh raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries
Directions
- Wash your raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries and set them aside until you are ready to assemble your parfait.
- Meanwhile, brew a strong ½ cup of the Awake Herbal Wellness tea. Four ounces of hot water over a strong serving of tea. For our purposes, we are going to do two tablespoons matte to four ounces of hot water. The typical Yerba Mate serving is one teaspoon per cup.
- Allow the tea to steep for five minutes. A longer steep will only account for a more bitter tea.
- Right before assembly, thinly slice your bananas to be layered throughout the parfait. If you don’t like bananas’ texture but enjoy the flavor, you can blend your banana into your yogurt.
- Strain your tea and sweeten it with Stevia cubes or Stevia in The Raw. We used three sugar cubes in our concentrate. We will use the concentrate in teaspoon increments for each layer.
- We used an injector (the same tool you use for a turkey) to add our tea around the ring of the glass just over the fruit. If you don’t have an injector you can simply spoon the concentrated liquid over the fruit to add that energy boost.
- Place your strained tea concentrate in the fridge or freezer to chill. You want it nice and cool when you build your parfait.
- Grab your glass and get ready to layer your ingredients: first, slide four or five banana slices down the wall of the glass, creating a ring.
- Then add the yogurt, then berries, then tea concentrate, finally crumbled cashews. Repeat each layer until you reach the top of the glass, being sure to finish with some berries, tea concentrate, and nuts on top.
Perfect Layers Start with Quality Ingredients
At Estero Bay, we import only the finest, highest quality teas, balsamic, and olive oil for our tea. Our offerings are incredibly versatile with rich characteristics—unique flavors that can easily be used by novice or chef alike in various healthful and gratifying tea and food recipes.
Enjoy all the world’s flavors and health benefits through our hand-chosen selection of first-rate teas, balsamic vinegar, and olive oils.
Sources
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/spearmint
https://daily.jstor.org/plant-of-the-month-mint/
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a19904677/greek-yogurt-for-breakfast/
https://www.bonappetit.com/story/how-to-drink-yerba-mate
https://medium.com/@jijokini/the-amazing-health-benefits-of-yerba-mate-763278c417c3
https://thenaturopathicherbalist.com/plant-constituents/saponins/