Tropical Papaya Smoothie Bowl with Ginger & Turmeric

A little food confession to start the day: until I came up with this papaya smoothie recipe, I had never tried papaya before!

Well, not quite true. I’d never tried a ripe, sweet papaya. My only papaya experience was of the green papaya salad variety, which is a totally different thing. But going back to my city-bound childhood, seasonal summer fruits were a little more mundane, along the lines of berries and plums. I was a teenager before I’d tried something as different (and expensive!) as a mango.

As a child, I was absolutely fascinated when huge slices of gigantic watermelons appeared at the greengrocer’s, their vivid carmine hunks speckled with glistening black seeds. Nobody could possibly afford an entire imported watermelon, I thought, so I loved to watch the big-handed grocer hack off chunks for us with an impossibly large blade. He’d weigh them out on his tapered scale, wrap them up with a wink – sometimes sneaking something extra into the bag – and then let me trundle back to nana’s house, quite literally bearing fruit.

We’d lay in the attempting-to-be-drought-resistant grass, staring up at the sky to spot shapes, with an occasional stop to spit out pips into the lawn somewhere. I doubt any of them ever took root in the pseudo summer of London, but sometimes I like to imagine they did. A little leftover of simple, happy times.

Writing that makes me realize how lucky I am now. To have access year round to an array of beautiful, seasonal fruits. To live somewhere that so many fruits and vegetables can thrive thanks to the diligence, skill & committment of local farmers, even though it seems somewhat impossible in the high desert. To be able to savor a variety of fresh produce on a daily basis the way I do now. It’s good to take a step back and realize what a blessing that is sometimes, because it can be so easy to take the everyday for granted. That’s especially true when it comes to being able to afford and enjoy fruits and vegetables that come from other places sometimes.

Papaya definitely falls into that final grouping, given that much of the papaya that makes its way to US stores likely comes from just across the border in Mexico, like the beautiful Maradol variety above that I had in my kitchen this week. While I’ve enjoyed and even taken for granted the availability of other tropical fruits like pineapples, mangoes, coconut and bananas, there are plenty of others that I’ve never taken home to try before. This week, I decided to try something new and came home with my very first papaya.

 

(Full disclosure: I was provided with Luminance Skincare products before writing this post. I only work with brands I genuinely love and wholeheartedly recommend, so creating custom content like this for you helps me keep Meatified up and running!)

And oddly enough, it wasn’t a recipe or a directly food related thing that inspired this choice! Instead, it was one of my favorite skincare, self care treats, a papaya enzyme based Exfoliating Mask from Luminance Skincare. If you follow along here on the regular, you’ll know that I cleaned up my skincare products and routines over a year ago now and I haven’t looked back.

Everything I use on my face and skin these days is completely free of anything synthetic and making that switch was actually incredibly easy because I replaced all of my usual products with their Luminance Skincare equivalent, because they’re organic, free of synthetic ingredients and quite literally good enough to eat!

Once a week, I use their Exfoliating Mask to gently exfoliate my skin without any nasty scratchy-itchies that irritate my skin. This is especially important for me because one of the less than awesome things I have to deal with when I experience a flare is perioral dermatitis. It’s about as fun as it sounds and leaves me with a red and scaly rash below and around my mouth and chin. Self conscious, much?

All of the Luminance products are gentle enough on my skin that they don’t exacerbate the condition and I actually find the Exfoliating Mask is a real blessing in minimizing that scaly-flaky stage. When I’m flare-free, I still love this mask for the way it leaves my skin bright, clear and soft to the touch — with none of the stripping, drying or irritating effects of harsher, less than natural products. (If you want to learn more about Luminance and some of my favorite products of theirs, I wrote about them in more detail here).

So, it turns out that the key ingredient for all that great, natural exfoliation action is the papaya enzyme, papain. And papain turns out to be an enzyme that is great for digestion, too, because it helps break down proteins. With that in mind, I thought my super ripe papaya was gonna be perfect for a digestion-easing, inflammation-busting, antioxidant-laden, vitamin-fest of a papaya smoothie bowl breakfast!

I wanted to keep things simple and easy to whip up, amping up the papaya’s natural sweet & musky nature with other tropical flavors, like pineapple, banana, coconut and lime. I also wanted to give it some good healthy fats, so I added a splash of coconut milk, along with a scoop of avocado. You can’t taste the avocado itself, but it adds a lovely natural creaminess and richness. For an extra boost of anti inflammatory goodness, I added some fresh ginger and a hint of turmeric to the mix. (If you’re not on the AIP elimination phase, add a pinch or two of black pepper for added absorption of the curcumin). And, voila! You’ve got the delicious but not overly sweet base of your Papaya Smoothie Bowl ready to go!

Now we get to the best part of smoothie bowls: the toppings! What I love about smoothie bowls vs the ones you drink with a straw is that you can make them thicker so that they’re spoonable rather than slurpable. This means they’re a great place to use whole fruits (so you get the digestive benefits of the fiber) and you can load em up with toppings that mean you’re chewing rather than drinking your food. Adding some chew really helps with your digestion, which is one of the reasons I tend to think of usual straight drinking smoothies as more of an emergency food or treat than breakfast.

So that’s why I called this Papaya Smoothie Bowl digestion-easing a little earlier. Along with the natural digestive benefits of the papaya, adding some chew is helping you get the most bang for your buck, digestion-wise, while the whole fruit fiber is helping you regulate the natural sugars of the fruits themselves. (If you want more science and nutrition knowledge bombs on building smarter smoothies, this post from Tasty Yummies is chock-full).

I topped my Papaya Smoothie Bowl with a mish mash of my favorite things. Sliced fresh figs and oranges. Crushed ginger chips and caramel sea salt coconut chips. Then I finished things off with a little drizzle of raw honey and some dried rose petals. Honestly, I meant to add a spoon or two of my Toasted Coconut Butter, but totally forgot. Oh, and for an extra protein boost, I added a couple scoops of collagen peptides when I blended up my papaya smoothie base. You don’t have to do the same, but it’s a nice addition if you’re into that sort of thing!

Remember that you can customize your Papaya Smoothie Bowl however you like! Some of my Sweet & Salted Granola would have been perfect here, and if you can tolerate nuts or seeds, you have a myriad of extra options to explore! Not to mention any number of different fresh, frozen or freeze dried fruits… you’ll have to tell me about your favorite combinations!

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(Full disclosure: I was provided with Luminance Skincare products before writing this post. I only work with brands I genuinely love and wholeheartedly recommend, so creating custom content like this for you helps me keep Meatified up and running!)