Kitchen Meets Bar

Top tips on how to incorporate kitchen ingredients into your drinks menu.

Top tips for using vegetables in cocktails

Seasonality, locality and freshness

• Vegetables will taste their best at the peak of the growing season and with the minimum amount of time between being harvested and consumed. For that reason, seasonality, locality and freshness are key. Make sure you’re using produce that’s grown locally and ensure it’s only on menu during its peak growing season, so you’ll have an abundant supply. This has the added benefit of minimising transport and refrigeration, which keeps costs down and also benefits the environment, so it’s a win/win situation.

The first taste is with the eye

• When processing some elements of your vegetables to use as ingredients in your cocktails and other elements to use as garnishes, ensure that the most beautiful examples are saved for garnishing. Whilst both beautiful ingredients and ugly ingredients from the same crop will taste great, one will look better than the other when used as a garnish. When receiving your vegetable order, sort through your crop and separate the best-looking examples to save for your garnishing.

Work closely with your kitchen team

• One of the benefits of using vegetables in your cocktails is that by working closely with your kitchen team, you can maximise your combined output and minimise waste. Communication is key, find out what vegetables are being used in the kitchen and which elements of those vegetables are being discarded. Through good communication and careful planning, the kitchen and bar can utilise waste elements of each other’s outputs to ensure maximum combined efficiency and minimal waste.

Imperfect fruit & vegetables

• If you are processing a vegetable, such as pureeing, you don’t always need to use the best looking produce. Talk to your farmer or supplier, as they may have second grade or over ripe produce which is great for cooking & preserving. Try looking for market rejected, imperfect fruit & vegetables, which the kitchen & bar can use for products such as jams, chutneys, purees and fermenting. This will also help to reduce a farmer or market’s waste and get you a better price for doing so.

Experiment with different vegetables and different processing techniques

• Different processing techniques will enable you to get a wide variety of different flavours from a single vegetable. For example, juicing and fermenting a vegetable like a beetroot, will give a vastly different taste to repeatedly roasting it to concentrate its natural sugars. Experiment with different processing techniques to extract the flavour you’re looking for in your perfect vegetable cocktail.

Practice preservation

• The challenge of using locally sourced, seasonal produce is that it won’t be available year-round, but by experimenting with different preservation techniques you can find the flavour that works for you and ensure its consistently available, even when your supply of fresh vegetables runs dry.