this is Chris from a bar above and today we're going to take a look at one of the easiest ways to capture all that beautiful flavor that's coming to the farmer's markets right now during the spring and summer so stay tuned so we've been doing our videos here for about a year or so and we've examined a lot of different techniques on how to capture those seasonal flavors a few of them that come to mind are tinctures infusions flavored simple syrups but we haven't covered how to make purees yet and it's one of the easiest techniques to do so that's what we're going to do today is take a look at how do you make a puree for a cocktail program so let's get into it shall we so the first thing that you want to do when you're making your puree is actually taste the fruit and see kind of where it is if it's too sweet if it's too sour if it's perfectly balanced because you're gonna have to adjust these variables you know in the blender so just get a general idea of kind of the sweetness levels and a tartness levels of your fruit generally speaking the earlier the fruit is in its growing season the Tartar it's going to be so a lot more acid to it the sugars haven't quite developed and as it moves through that growing season it becomes more and more sweet peaches are a perfect example that nectarines wine grapes another perfect example that so just a kind of a general rule of thumb so the only thing we're going to do now is break down our fruit that means take away all the inedible parts to it and chop it up into smaller pieces so now that we've broken down our fruit we're going to go ahead and add it to the blender add some simple syrup to it and also some acidity in this case lime juice to taste and to balance it out to the point that we want it so you can really have a lot of leeway on the final sweetness and acid levels of a puree and it's really nice because you eliminate those steps in when you're building your cocktails so it's kind of a nice side benefit of that so that's all we're going to do now is going to our strawberry to the blender and then fire this guy up with a little bit of simple syrup and the acid so yeah I think we're going to add a little bit of both acid and simple syrup to it just increase the body of it and add the flavors as well and this is one of the beautiful things about making purees is that you can really kind of go in small steps to really get the flavor that you want to so the thing I love about working with purees is the color that it gives to the final cocktail it gives a really beautiful vibrant color to it and you can add a little bit of acid to kind of really preserve that the color and prevent oxidation but you know it just gives a really really gorgeous color to the to the final cocktail so we're pretty much done this is very very liquidy and like I said the flavors there were pretty much all set so I'm just going to go ahead and find strain this out remove all the pulp and what we're left with is a puree that we can work with cocktails now a couple of suggestions that I have for you for anybody making purees is add a little bit of alcohol to it and that what this is going to do is really increase the shelf life so if you're working with purees behind the bar they typically only last like two to three days and you definitely want to taste it one of the easiest ways to find out if the puree has done bad or not is usually you see them in squeezy bottles little tiny like ketchup bottles essentially and if you shake them up with your finger over the top of it and you let it off and it kind of expels a little bit of gas it's probably time to break out a new batch of puree also obviously by tasting turns a little bit tart and almost kind of metallic then you know that it's time to change out your purees but essentially that's pretty much it now what like I said one of the beautiful things that you can do is batch freeze all these so you can do them in much smaller containers and pull them out as you need it you know the day up or you know couple hours before your shift and you should be fun to go stay tuned we're going to have some more cocktail videos in the future but until then as always I hope you guys have a great shift in Cheers if you enjoyed this video subscribe to our YouTube channel find us on google+ or visit us at a bar above calm