Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where today, we’re taking things a little easy. As summer comes to a close, we wanted to serve up some drinks we can savor together, but that push our boundaries a little. To that end, we’ve made two agua frescas. If you want to skip the chit-chat, and get straight to the sipping, here’s a link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Drink Me

Now, interestingly, this is a topic we’ve lightly danced around before. Aguas Frescas, meaning “fresh/cool waters” are a long-standing Mexican and central American drink, with a wide range of options. Horchata is an agua fresca. Mexican Jamaica, or sweet hibiscus tea, is an agua fresca. Agua de cebada, literally “Barley Water”, is an agua fresca. So, what, exactly, is an agua fresca?

Well, that’s complicated, in that it’s a little too simple to easily explain. Like, aguas frescas are “stuff mixed with water and maybe some sugar to make a nice little drink.” The drinks themselves are functionally pre-historic, with no records of their origin, just records of their EXISTENCE that indicate they are were made before Columbus came to the region. They’re part of a as-of-yet unformalized category of South and Central American drinks, including things like tejate, champurrado, tejuino, tepache, etc. All of which are dishes involving using (often fermented) masa dough or fermented fruit peels as flavoring agents and potentially as slight curing agents, since the light alcohol of the fermented products has a light anti-microbial effect. This is one of the reasons that alcohol is called “the water of life”: before knowledge of the germ theory, people didn’t understand why some water made you sick. They knew beer and other alcohols DIDN’T (or at least, didn’t in the same way), and that boiling water had something to do with it. Now, the very low alcohol content of these lightly fermented drinks means they were by no means purified, but they were mildly safer than unprocessed water.

Which is WILD, when you see some of them in person. “You want some brown water with floating crap in it” is not normally a great sell.

Barring that potential medical advantage, there is a definite other advantage: it is well documented that flavoring water increases consumption of it. People just like their water to taste like something. And in hot tropical regions, hydration is important, so it makes sense that early versions of Gatorade/flavored waters would be very important.

So there are DOZENS of forms of aguas frescas, all depending on what you’re combining. There are cantaloupe aguas frescas, cantaloupe-seed horchatas, cucumber agua frescas, basically anything you can juice, or make into a “milk” can be an agua fresca. (Though I would be remiss to not point out that, in American Mexican restaurants, the ‘big three’ agua frescas are horchata, tamarindo (tamarind water), and Jamaica.) And that means these recipes can be as easy or as complicated as you want to make them. For today’s recipe, we went with 2 options that I would call “middling” difficulty/complexity: they’ve each got three different flavors going on, one of which is slightly savory, and they both require a little bit of actual cooking. So let’s make a splash.

A ‘Andful of ‘erbs

The first recipe I made is the one I made the most mistakes on, so let’s all buckle in for that. Both recipes come from a cookbook I picked up specifically FOR aguas frescas and paletas (a Mexican variety of popsicle) named…”Agua Frescas and Paletas”, by Ericka Sanchez

Look, not every book needs a flashy title.

I decided to start with something simple: Blackberry Mint Lemonade. We planted mint 2 years ago, so 1/5th of our backyard has been consumed by it, I bought some frozen blackberries, and the only other ingredients were lemon juice, water, and simple syrup. Specifically, the recipes called for raw…oh. Now that I’m re-reading this, they called for PURE cane sugar. And looking at their definitions…I can’t tell if they’re using those terms interchangeably. (If you don’t remember our culinary compendium on sugar, or discussion of sugar as a currency crop: most modern white sugar these days is beet sugar, because it turns out it’s MUCH easier to get sugar out of beets than out of sugar cane. So “raw cane sugar” would specifically denote “cane sugar that hasn’t been fully processed”, while “PURE cane sugar” could refer to cane sugar that’s gone through any degree of processing. I THINK they’re implicitly the same, because the definitions note that, if you don’t have “pure cane sugar”, you can use “granulated”, which they specify as ‘beet’. So I THINK the turbinado sugar I used was correct.

This sugar is pure, and raw. But is it TOO raw?

Anywho, yeah, the first thing you do is simmer some turbinado sugar and water together until it’s fully dissolved. Then you go out back, and learn that the last few weeks and your family’s lack of interest in gardening have killed every mint plant in the backyard. They’ll be back to haunt you next year, but for now, you need a different herb. Basil is in the mint family. There’s a recipe for Blackberry and Basil mojitos, which normally use mint. Boom. Easy substitution. So now we’re making Blackberry Basil Lemonade.

Preview: This picture was not intended for this post. So keep an eye out for more basil in the future.

From there, super easy: toss blackberries, basil, and lemon juice in a blender, and turn it into a smooth mix. This will be MUCH EASIER with fresh or thawed blackberries, but I made do with frozen. You can then add it to a pitcher with the syrup and the water, “with or without straining”. And as someone who’s made it: I think straining would be better. There’s just enough seeds to dirty up cups in an unappealing way, and to add a touch of grit to the profile.

This LOOKS a lot chunkier than it ended up being, because the blackberries haven’t fully thawed yet.

We’ll discuss the exact turn-out at the end of the other recipe. So let’s beet that one out. (Eh? Oh, yeah, you don’t know there’s beet in it.)

Beet it, Just Beet it

The next one is more complicated, and less immediately ‘graspable’. Like, this is a mixture of strawberries, orange juice, and beet. That’s not a combo that’s going to ‘click’ in the same way that “blackberry lemonade with an added herb” does, but it’s not insane. As JUST noted, beets do have a bunch of sugar, and are indeed where we GET most of our sugar from these days. Beets are not the most beloved vegetable, but roasted beets can be quite delicious, as can pickled ones, in my opinion. I describe them as “tasting like sweet dirt, in a good way”.

The first step is the longest: toss a beet in a pot, and boil that thing for an hour. The water will turn into a disturbing pool of nigh-black goop, but that’s normal.

For values of “normal”.

This is because beets are very firm, so to have it puree easily, you want it softened. After an hour of boiling, pull the steaming heart from your dark pool.

I had to tweak the colors on here a little to make the steam clearer, but I assure you, it looks real cool in person.

And then…if you’re me, you leave. I accidentally took too long making the first agua fresca, so the day I cooked the beet, I didn’t have time to peel and puree it and make the rest of the drink. So I popped it in my fridge, to deal with it later. Which…might have been a mistake. Our fridge has gotten temperamental the last month or two, and started freezing things for some reason. So when I came back to the beet a couple days later, it had frozen through, which likely impacted its texture. The same had also happened to my Strawberries. It DIDN’T happen to the oranges, because they’d been sitting on the floor, so it was just a matter of me spending 15+ minutes juicing 4 whole oranges.

I wish I’d had the 10 seconds of thought to photograph them BEFORE throwing them in the trash, but no one’s perfect.

Blend the beet pieces, strawberries, and water until smooth, and strain into a pitcher. This was a moderate hassle, as “straining” a juice like this (especially with the tiny ice shards) involves working it through the strainer by stirring. So I called in Nate and my mom to help me by mixing water, orange juice, and sugar in the pitcher, while pouring more of the beet-berry mixture into the strainer to work into juice.

Which is beautifully red, if irritating to strain.

Then they were mixed together, and the result was…divisive. Turns out a fine metal strainer was not enough to fully strain the smallest chunks of the fruit out. The texture, which was a little like a orange juice with a lot of very fine pulp, caused my mother to spit out her drink. Nate refused to try it, I believe, and I thought it was…tolerable. As such, my mother and I strained the whole mixture AGAIN through cheese cloth. And once we did THAT, it was much better. Basically no texture at all.

I will note that, maybe it was because I froze the beet, but the beet flavor is not joking around in this. The recipe says it’s “not overpowering”, and the ‘not’ in that descriptor is doing a fair bit of work. It is irrefutably PRESENT. The drink itself is beautiful, and I think with say, the beet flavor turned down by 15% or so, it’d be pretty great. Maybe, unintuitively, a bit of salt would have helped: salt is better at reducing bitter flavors than sugar, so maybe a tsp or two of salt in the pitcher would have helped bring the flavors more in line.

I can’t deny, though, it’s a pretty son-of-a-bitch. …hey, that gives me an idea!

The Blackberry Basil Lemonade had a similar issue, where the basil flavor was a little overtuned. The recipe called for 2 tbsps of mint, and I think doing a 1 to 1 swap was a flawed call. I think with 1.5 tbsps, you’d get much better results. Still, just because I feel that way doesn’t mean you won’t love them, and if you don’t like them, they’re not particularly hard to tinker with. So I hope you give them a shot.

THURSDAY: I THINK WE’RE DRINKING MORE JUICE, FOR A MELLOW MELA DAY.

MONDAY: I ALREADY LOST THE THREAD OF THIS MONTH, SO MAYBE SOME PASTA, MAYBE SOMETHING ELSE.

Here are the

Recipes

Blackberry Basil Lemonade

Makes 2 quarts lemonade

Ingredients

Simple Syrup

½ cup raw cane sugar

1 cup water

Lemonade

3 cups blackberries

1 ½ cup lemon juice

2 tbsp fresh basil (or less! I recommend a little less!)

4 cups water

Preparation

Make the simple syrup by putting the sugar and water in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir until sugar is fully dissolved. Remove from the heat.
Combine the blackberries, lemon juice, and basil in a blender. Blend until smooth.
Pour the water and simple syrup into a large (2 quart) pitcher. Pour the blackberry mixture into the pitcher through a fine metal strainer. Stir to combine.
Chill and serve.

Pretty S.O.B Punch (Strawberry, Orange, Beet)

Makes 2 quarts

Ingredients

1 medium-sized red beet

2 cups strawberries, hulled

1 ¼ cups freshly squeezed orange juice

6 cups of water, divided (1 cup, 5 cups)

2/3rd cup raw cane sugar

Preparation

In a medium saucepan, cover the beet with cold water. Bring to boil, and cook, covered, for 1 hour. Once soft (test by stabbing with a knife: little to no resistance = good), remove from the heat, drain, and allow the beet to cool.
Peel the beet, discarding the skin, and cut into large pieces.
Place beet pieces, hulled strawberries, and 1 cup water into a blender. Blend until smooth, and strain well into a large pitcher (preferably through cheesecloth). Add remaining ingredients to the pitcher, and stir to combine.
Serve chilled, or over ice.