Milk and Date Shake

Last month I've learnt how to make a new drink. It is milk and date shake! I will call it so to be inline with milk and banana shake which I enjoyed greatly since my early childhood.

I learnt this new drink only last month upon my visit to a young Egyptian guy who has taken 6 feddans (around 6 hectars just a bit more) of land in Wadi El Natrun which is in the Western Egyptian Desert. The interesting thing is that this guy had no electricity in his land yet recently bought a small generator that works on gasoline. He also bought a blender which he plugs into electric outlets from that generator. The more interesting thing though is that this young guy has improvised to make such wonderful drink. He had never heard of it before nor had he tried drinking it in the past. He just set on to try and added dates (after removing the seeds of course) to the blender with some milk and found that it tasted wonderful!

I tried it there, and indeed was amazed with the taste! He used powdered milk, yet when I went back home in Cairo I made it with fresh milk instead and it tasted just the better.

Here is how it is done: Remove the seeds from dates (preferably soft dates) and put them in the blender without moving their outer skin. Add milk. Start the blender. That's it. This method results in a highly sweet drink so you may consider adding water to make it more sutable for your palate.

By the way, this is no traditional Egyptian drink and the great majority of Egyptians don't know it. My mother was astonished when I first told her about it but was delighted after she tasted it for the first time. Yet in Egypt and other Arab countries we have a traditional drink/food which is basically made by soaking dates (seeds removed) into warm milk then leaving them for some time. The result is a really delicous kind of food. It's been knonw for hundreds of years. Yet the shaked version is brand new for us here and does indeed taste great. Perhaps you ought to try it out yourself and see. Remember to add water in order for it not to bee too sweet for you unless you need that much sweetness in your drink. An excellent drink for athletes I guess or for the rest of us after an exercise.

By the way, the type of dates I used is called rotab, it is dark and soft and has an outer skin. We easily squeze the rotab date out of its black outer skin when eating it yet when making this milk and date shake the outer skin is not to be removed. That was another astonishing thing for me to notice and for my mom as well till we tried the drink by ourselves and found that the outer skin 'disolved' completely into the drink and tasted so good.