Fresh Strawberry Milk

I love a fresh ripe strawberry. A good one is hard to come by, and most times I put sugar on them to get them up to par. Now I am growing them myself and they are nothing, but sweet! The single thing I do the most is make my hydration count. I don’t drink plain water unless I have added some sort of nutrient to it. This ridiculous notion that we should take eight cups of water and flush out our nutrition before our body even has a change to extract what it needs from it is problematic. I am all for hydration, but plain water that is laden with plastic and pollution is counterproductive to good health. So many fruits have their issues as well, mainly the toxic PUFA seeds in them. The fiber in fruit is bloating as well, so I am not up for that. There is so much unique nutrition in each kind of fruit that no lab can possibly duplicate, and I take advantage of those offerings, instead of avoiding certain fruits, and this is why I don’t have to take supplements. Most times I soak fruits, peels and herbs in water and drink it up, but I do this with my milk as well. In the past, to make a chemical free strawberry milk I would crush and boil strawberries, add sugar and strain off the seeds and fiber, but it seemed a shame to destroy some of the sensitive nutrients in the fruit, like vitamin C. So now I make my strawberry milk fresh.

I prefer to buy my fruit frozen, since most fresh fruit is picked before it is ripe, then degraded in warehouses, in trucks traveling to places, then sit in the backroom of stores and finally on the store shelf, before being purchased. Frozen fruit is better, fresh picked when ripe and soon after it’s frozen. To make my strawberry milk I half defrost my strawberries and mash them a bit to get more surface area for the milk to make contact. I pour milk over them and let them sit for 24 hours, or even longer is ok. Strain the milk into a glass and add sugar to taste. If you let the strawberries sit longer, give them a stir once in awhile so the surface doesn’t oxidize, with the fruit turning a slight brown. Where Ray Peat suggests putting sugar in milk to balance it’s protein, my way is even better! This is one of the reasons I don’t take any supplements, I get a lot of variety.

“Combining milk and cheese with fruits adds to the antistress effect. The additional sugar and potassium and other minerals allow the milk protein to be used more efficiently, by moderating the secretion of cortisol, and helping to inhibit the secretion of PTH.” -Ray Peat