This Mango Slushy Is a Personal Air Conditioner
Every Wednesday night, Bon Appétit food director Carla Lalli Music takes over our newsletter with a sleeper-hit recipe from the Test Kitchen vault. It gets better: If you sign up for our newsletter, you'll get this letter before everyone else.
What the slush?
I don’t understand why more people aren’t making this glorious personal air-conditioner of a beverage. I haven’t seen even a single picture of the Healthyish Beauty-Food Mango Slushy in my Instagram feed, and yet I’ve seen a thousand videos of people getting out moving cars doing the #kikidoyouloveme dance.
The slushy is not only more entertaining, it’s more rewarding.
You don’t even have to wait for the image to load to know there’s genius at work. Enticement begins with the recipe name alone: Beauty-Food Mango Slushy. Sure, fine, whatever—it’s blended frozen fruit that you can drink, but don’t you dare call it a “smoothie”. This is a slushy, and if you’ve ever been tempted to buy a plastic sandal simply because someone labeled it a Jelly, you know how important branding can be.
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A slushy, despite (or maybe because of) its subliminal associations with 7-Eleven Slurpees, sounds freaking incredible. It sounds special. A slushy is, in fact, colder than a smoothie (I just decided). Remember the Polar Vortex winter of 2015, when the Atlantic ocean got so cold that the waves started to freeze? That’s what this is like, except the ingredients are straight out of the tropical zone: Frozen mango, lean and hydrating coconut water, zippy lime juice, a big pinch of salt, and a non-ignorable amount of crushed red pepper flakes. Molly Baz, who created this concoction, took the legendary combination of fresh mango with Tajín and lime juice and slushified it. You’re welcome! (Thanks, Molly.)
Back to the genius marketing though: “Beauty-Food Mango Slushy.” Beauty food! Now that you mention it, that vibrant orange is quite a fetching color! You mean the slushy has vitamins A and C to make me more beautiful! As if! What the heck—make mine a double!
Smoothies are for children. They always have bananas, and you blend them till they’re frothy, and then you stick a biodegradable straw in them and hope your kid doesn’t taste the cup of rolled oats you added for nutrition. It’s called survival.
Alternatively, a slushy made with frozen mango whips up into a dense, crystallized, silky, semi-frozen state, and instead of the straw there’s a smattering of chile flakes. It’s grown-up stuff, and if you added a few ounces of rum—well, that would be beautiful too.
If I had half a brain, I would be subsisting on these exclusively. Instead I have been enduring late-afternoon tastings of the entire Thanksgiving menu in the test kitchen for the past two weeks, as the New York City heat and humidity wreaks havoc on my attitude and my naturally curly hair. I’m a special kind of cranky that only a very photogenic slushy can fix. See you at the swim-up bar.
Get the recipe:
Beauty-Food Mango Slushy
