Damien mixes: Passion Fruit Cooler

© Damien Guichard

The last community cocktail of this year is a very special one: not only did you choose the main ingredient yourselves, but some of you had the chance to choose it live at BCB 2023!

Passion fruit it is! As you can imagine passion fruit does not grow all year around in Germany. Yet because of iconic libations such as the Pornstar Martini, it is still an ingredient that people enjoy playing around with in one form or another. While using fresh passion fruit would be highly cost inefficient and purees don’t tend to go hand in hand with our aesthetic here at Wax On, we will be using 100% pure passion fruit juice.  

Creating a Drink

My approach when coming up with cocktail is simple: how can I get as much flavour out of a product as possible and very importantly - what texture and mouthfeel am I looking for? Another important thing is cost: when it sometimes makes sense to use so-called fancy techniques, those can be costly and the process can take long so in this case we will go for the old trusted agar agar clarification process.  

© Damien Guichard

Passion Fruit Cordial

First of all we are going to weigh out our overall weight: 1000g of liquid. Out of that 1000g, we are going to isolate 250g and bring it to a simmer. Then, we are going to add 2g of agar agar powder to your simmering passion fruit nectar and stir it until well dissolved. Once that’s done, transfer your agar agar and passionfruit mixture to a container and add your 750g of passion fruit juice to it. Stir until well mixed and stick in the freezer.  

After a couple of hours, your agar agar passion fruit mixture will have taken a jelly consistency. That means that it’s ready to filter through a coffee filter. You now have clarified passion fruit. Congrats: now let’s turn that into a nice cordial.  

Passion fruit juice has a nice acidity level, which means we’re going to aim at emphasizing that acidity in order to use the cordial without the addition of any other tradition source of acidity such as citrus.  

For a Passion Fruit Cordial combine:  

• 1/3 of sugar to clarified passion fruit ratio
• 0.5% of citric acid powder
• 0.5% of malic acid powder
• Process in blender at 40C for 5min ( or at best sous vide if you do not own a food processer)
• Bottle and label

Now that we have our Passion Fruit Cordial ready, let’s make a little drink.   

Recipe for a “Passion Fruit Cooler”