Want to experiment with home-cooked meals but don’t know where to start? Here’s how you can add more color to your diet through the popular Clitoria ternatea—better known as Butterfly Pea Flower or Blue Ternate
Eating isn’t just about nutrition since it can be a fun and visually exciting experience, too. While the Butterfly Pea Flower is nutritious, adding this edible flower to the mix can turn drinks and dishes blue, thereby elevating your dining experience even while at home. This flower is also easy to grow in your personal garden and is adaptable to our country’s climate.
RELATED: The Nutritional Benefits of Eating Butterfly Pea Flowers
Now that we’ve established that edible flowers can have different health benefits—the most notable of which are that it’s rich in antioxidants, anti-inflammatory, and has anticancer potential—let’s explore the ways you can add these to your diet.
Drink it
Since the Butterfly Pea Flower is native to Asia, you can bet that plenty of cultures familiar with it have made recipes surrounding it. One common way that people even outside of Asia consume this flower is by adding it to tea or plain water. But the above video shows five more ways you can drink the flower, such as in a lemonade, mocktail, iced tea, coffee, and tea latte. The tea latte concoction is our personal favorite, too!
RELATED: Ending the Debate Between Tea and Coffee
Cook it
Our favorite way of cooking with Blue Ternate is by using it to make blue rice. Malaysians are known for this dish as well, which would be traditionally served with protein like fish or chicken on the side along with other plant ingredients. Another way you can cook this flower is by baking it into bread, cake, pudding, and so much more.
Use it as garnish
If you’re not particularly fond of blue food or blue drinks but are still interested in reaping the benefits of Butterfly Pea Flowers, then using them as garnish is for you. You can add them to your salad, your pasta, your rice dish, and just about anything else since the whole plant is safe to eat. Plenty of restaurants in the Philippines have also been adopting this trend, so you won’t miss out on eating these edible flowers even if you don’t know how to or are unable to cook at home.
