Summer is almost here! I can feel it. I’m downright giddy about the explosion of colorful summertime fruit at the farmers’ markets right now.

It seems serendipitous that the hottest season of the year would produce produce that hardly requires any help. I treat ripe strawberries like dessert; just rinse and eat.

One of my favorite ways to enjoy fresh fruit is in agua fresca form. Agua frescas are refreshing fruit drinks made simply of fruit blended with water, lime juice and a bit of sweetener.

Aguas frescas are popular in Mexico and Central America, although I ordered the most incredible pineapple agua fresca in Austin, Texas, earlier this year.

I’m not much of a juice drinker, but I love agua frescas because they can be served unfiltered. So, unlike regular juice, you’re sipping up all the fiber that is inherent in the fruit rather than filtering it out.

In theory, that means that they won’t cause quite the blood sugar spike that regular juices can. Plus, you can make it in a blender and skip the filtering step.

Watch How to Make Aguas frescas

The Best Fruit for Aguas Frescas

I experimented by making agua frescas with quite a few kinds of fruit. Here are my favorites:

• Pineapple
• Strawberries
• Cucumber, especially with fresh mint
• Cantaloupe
• Honeydew melon
• Watermelon (it’s so juicy that you don’t need to add any water; see my watermelon juice recipe)

I don’t recommend these fruits:

• Cherries turned into a cherry lime-aid, but their color changed pretty quickly.
• Blueberries and blackberries weren’t sweet enough and required filtering through a fine mesh sieve to remove the seeds.

The key to making perfectly smooth, unfiltered agua frescas is a high-powered blender. Vitamix sent me their Vitamix Professional Series 750 blender, which takes “high powered” to a new level!

This machine is amazing. It has a total of five pre-programmed settings for making smoothies (which is the setting I used to make these drinks), hot soups (no stove required!), frozen desserts and purées. The fifth setting is a cleaning setting to make sure the container is squeaky clean once you’re done. I really like the tamper that comes with the blender, which lets me push down any ice or nuts that need help in super thick mixtures.

It’s totally magical to transform fresh produce into new forms with just the press of a button. My new Vitamix blends up super smooth agua frescas in less than a minute flat! Summertime, coming up.

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This post was sponsored by Vitamix and I received compensation for my participation. Opinions are my own, always. Thank you for supporting the sponsors who support C+K!.