How To Soften Dates For Recipes (NO Equipment) - This is a quick method to revive stale, hard dates so that you can use them in smoothies and other recipes.

While I am currently NOT eating dates, I still buy many of them for the other members of my family.

The kids love them in smoothies, in particular, so we keep a batch of softened dates in our fridge.

Oftentimes, the girls will go to make a smoothie recipe with dates, but the dates I've bought are hard. If you've ever tried to blend a hard or even semi-hard date, you know it doesn't blend correctly. You end up with tiny bites of date throughout the smoothie instead of a general sweetness.

Well, the method below solves that problem, and you don't need a food processor or blender to do it!

These days, most people have blenders and processors, but I know for me, it's so nice to not have to drag it out and clean it.

This is not the most innovative technique, I admit, but it is one I employ quite often, so I thought I'd post it here.

By no means am I making date paste or 'butterizing' the dates, rather just employing a quick trick to soften them.

Once they are softened, they can be kept in a glass container for future use. The fridge doesn't ruin the 'softness', which is great, so you don't have to repeat the process each time!