Let's Make Raspberry Agua Fresca

Hi everybody and welcome back to my kitchen. Probably everybody knows about agua de jamaica, that famous agua fresca from Mexico. It's made with the hibiscus flowers and it has that cranberry tartness to it. Incredibly refreshing and that beautiful crimson color. Well today I'm just going to take it to the next level by adding some fruit to it. Let me take you through that process. We're going to make the concentration of jamaica flowers first. I have a quart of water here and two cups of the jamaica flowers. I'm going to put those into the water and turn that off and then I'm going to put in a cup and a quarter of sugar. So there goes one cup of it and about a quarter there. Now you can adjust the sweetness level to suit your own taste here. I find a cup and a quarter for this amount of jamaica to be absolutely perfect. We're going to let this steep for a while. It could go as little as 30 minutes but I actually like to kind of push it to about an hour to extract as much of that flavor out of this as possible. After it has steeped that amount of time I'll show you what the next step is. Okay this has steeped now for about an hour and I'm going to pour it through a strainer so we get all of the the hibiscus out of there. Now this stuff remember is going to be quite concentrated so we are going to now dilute it with about one and a one and a half quarts of water. Now everybody has their own perfect dilution. Some people like the jamaica stronger and some people like it weaker so you'll find yours right. For me it's the one and a half quarts dilution that is perfect for me. Okay so now I am going to blend in red raspberries. Red raspberries from our farmer's market. I just love raspberry season here in Chicago and so combining the raspberries with the jamaica I think is just kind of spectacular there. So we're going to pour some of this jamaica into the blender enough to cover them nicely and then put the top on and blend. All right I think that's very yeah it's very nicely blended in. I'm going to get rid of the the jamaica flowers in my compost bowl here to put the strainer here because remember that the raspberries have a lot of little seeds. So I'm going to strain this through with that smell of fresh raspberries in the summertime. One of the great reasons to live around the midwest because we have such beautiful raspberries here. Okay I think we've collected all those seeds here in the bottom of this strainer. Set those over there. So I want you to see what this looks like in a really pretty picture here. Look at that. I tell you that is such a festive a festive look to it and now I have a glass with ice. Fill that up and this is agua fresca at its best. Salud.