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Summer cocktails are all about capturing sunshine in a glass. The Strawberry Fizz is just that, full of fresh strawberry flavours, balanced with peppery spice, bitter orange and refreshing sourness. Here’s the recipe for the cocktail, and the mixology product behind it, the Strawberry & Peppercorn Shrub.
| By Cameron Mowat
It’s a common childhood memory for many people – being given a bowl of cut up strawberries with sugar sprinkled on top and a little squeeze of lemon juice.
After munching through the strawberries, you’re left with a sticky sweet strawberry syrup in the bottom of the bowl for you to spoon up or slurp down, completing the culinary experience with a shot of sugary strawberry juice.
This is the nostalgic flavour of childhood summers that we tried to capture in this drink. Strawberry can be a surprisingly difficult flavour to capture in its freshest form. While there are hundreds if not thousands of strawberry products out there, not many have mastered isolating the fresh flavour, as if you’d just bitten into one.
Strawberry products tend to go ‘jammy’, ending up much more rich and thick than the light, bright and zingy flavour of the fresh fruit. We played around with lots of different ways to try and achieve the freshness in a product that we wanted. The solution we found was using a sous-vide. This technique allowed us to gently pull the freshness from our fruit into the sugars without cooking them, avoiding the jamminess.
With a touch of peppercorns and vinegar we managed to replicate the ‘zing’ factor and come away with a Strawberry & Peppercorn Shrub that fit perfectly into our summer twist on the classic Tom Collins.
The Strawberry Fizz is a fusion concept, combining the refreshing qualities of a Spritz, the sour balance of a Collins and the sweetness of fresh summer fruits. By adding a splash of Aperol to compliment the Strawberry & Peppercorn Shrub, the complexity of the drink develops nicely, while still staying light and bubbly. Perfect to batch up for sunny summer sessions!
Recipe for the Strawberry & Peppercorn Shrub
Ingredients:
🔷 250g Strawberries
🔷 250g Sugar
🔷 60g White Wine Vinegar
🔷 6g Mixed Peppercorns
Method:
🔶 Add Strawberries, Peppercorns & Sugar into a vacuum bag, seal and place in Sous Vide bath at 63c for 1 hour.
🔶 Once the juice is extracted from the Strawberries, remove from the sous vide and place all ingredients in metal bowl.
🔶 Add Vinegar to the mixture, stir until all ingredients are integrated.
🔶 Strain through muslin cloth.
🔶 Bottle and refrigerate.
Recipe for the Strawberry Fizz
Ingredients:
🔷 50ml Hendricks Gin (or other floral forward gin)
🔷 10ml Aperol
🔷 20ml Lemon Juice
🔷 15ml Strawberry & Pink Peppercorn Shrub
🔷 Top Thomas Henry Soda
🔷 Garnish: Strawberry Slice and Mint Leaf
Method:
🔶 Add all but the soda into the shaker, shake well and strain into a highball glass with cubed ice.
🔶 Top with a splash of soda water, mix gently, garnish and serve.
