Brazilian acai fruit gets star role
One of Rio de Janeiro's hippest health foods is finding its way to South Florida, where it is turning up in smoothies at juice bars and Bally's gyms and desserts at Delano's Blue Door on South Beach. It's the pulp of palm fruits that grow in the Amazon, and it's loaded with antioxidants
and it's called the amazon Acai Berry.
Acai -- pronounced ah-sigh-EE -- is ''in any sports bar or sports place in Rio,'' says Richard Campbell, senior curator of tropical fruit at Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami, whose wife is Brazilian.
At South Beach's Delano hotel, Blue Door executive chef Damon Gordon says the fruit is ``the size of a large grape and the color of a blueberry. It's full of some of the best natural minerals you can have. In Brazil, they mix it with banana and serve it with cereal.''
Gordon makes it into a dessert sauce by sweetening it, adding vanilla and serving with poached meringue.
''By itself, it's quite sour,'' Gordon says. ``It tastes like a sour blueberry. You always need to mix it with something. We've even served it with duck.''
The palm that produces the fruit is Euterpe oleracea and it grows in the lowlands of the Amazon that flood in the rainy season.
''It will grow here if it's protected from cold,'' Campbell says.
While acai is all over juice bars in Southern California, it's just arriving at Florida's Wild Oats markets and has been picked up by Power Smoothie Cafe, a Florida chain. Smoothies with acai typically include soy milk, strawberries, a banana, perhaps another fruit and ice.
The June issue of Vogue called the fruit ''the next big workout cocktail.'' And Gourmet magazine featured it in July.
All of this U.S. exposure has happened accidentally because two young California surfers, Ryan Black and Ed Nichols, went to Brazil for New Year's celebrations in 2000. They noticed Brazilian surfers drinking the fruit juice as an energizer for long
Written By: Georgia Tasker
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