Aloe Juice

A friend gave me an aloe plant as a gift, knowing I have a brown thumb but assuring me that the plant is hardy. He told me, "If you kill this plant, you're hopeless."

The poor thing hasn't been doing well under my care. I harvested a leaf the other day, not because it was big and ready for the taking, but because it had a rotting spot at its base and was doomed.

If you've ever looked up how to make aloe juice, most sources on the internet reccommend blending it with orange juice. They say that the aloe tastes "bitter" by itself, so it needs to be mixed with something sweet. Of course, I had to taste the gel straight up and see for myself.

Bitter? It tastes like a dirty armpit. No exaggeration. And then I left the cut leaf sitting on the edge of my kitchen sink while I went to research uses for it, and when I came back the whole sink area smelled like an armpit. You've got to fillet the aloe quickly and use it immediately. You wash the leaf, trim the thorns and the green skin, and you'll be left with a clear fillet of aloe gel which is very slimy. You've got to rinse the fillet thoroughly before you add it to anything you drink, because the slime supposedly gives you the runs.

I blended the gel into prune juice because it was the only juice I had. It's a weird juice for me to have on hand because 1) since becoming vegan I poo like clockwork and 2) because I usually never have any juice on hand. (I've been on painkillers for the past few weeks due to an injury. The painkillers constipated me so I got the prune juice over the weekend and stopped taking the pills. Voila, problem solved, but I still had some prune juice left over.) When I blended the aloe into the juice I couldn't taste the aloe at all, even when I chewed the occasional unblended piece.

Aloe juice: a tasty solution to a dying aloe plant.   :(

What do you use aloe for?


Vegan on a Shoestring