Barfly: No fresh fruit? No problem, thanks to this Northern California company

It’s the dead of winter. But it’s hard to tell if you look out your California window.

But the truth is, California winters expose a few cocktail problems. One is fresh fruit, because contrary to what you might have heard or read, fresh-squeezed juice is not always the best option. Take brunch, for instance. What brunch doesn’t include “fresh-squeezed” orange juice? Never mind that oranges are out of season in spring and summer, aka prime brunch season. So does having a fresh-squeezed out-of-season fruit really make a difference? Maybe. We as consumers are also conditioned to eat, squeeze or juice another wholly unripe citrus fruit: the Persian lime. When limes are ripe, they are yellow and have a much more balanced flavor, meaning that every single green Persian lime that you’ve ever seen is an unripe fruit.

Luckily, there are workarounds. And the Perfect Purée of Napa Valley provides several. Long a ubiquitous fixture in the food service industry, the Perfect Purée of Napa Valley is also available to the general public on their website and through online retailers like Amazon.

“We don’t have a huge consumer following just because the product’s frozen, and it does have to ship overnight, which can be a little bit expensive,” said Montia Garcia, the company’s director of marketing. “Home users often purchase our products because they’ve tried a really good margarita or some drink in a bar, and they just want to be able to recreate that at home.”

Successful restaurants and bars are about consistency. And the fact is that fresh fruit isn’t really that consistent. A perfectly ripe strawberry is a sublime fruit. But when it’s not perfectly ripe, you have to go through a lot of mechanizations to get it right. Just try making a strawberry margarita using only fresh strawberries. You will need to add more sugar than you’d think, and even then, the color won’t be right.

“The legacy purees are what keeps the lights on,” Garcia said. “That’s what we started with in 1988, and that’s what we’re still selling.”

The Perfect Purée of Napa Valley currently makes 23 different fruit purees. The two top sellers are mango and blood orange.

“I think most of our customers have seasonal menus, but a lot of them also want to offer that same drink year-round,” Garcia said. “They really value that consistency so that they can always make a core menu item, and they know that they can also easily source our products.”

The Perfect Purée of Napa Valley prides itself on using only natural, non-GMO fruit.

“We’re not growing any new fruits in a lab or anything like that,” said Garcia with a laugh.

They also offer a selection of seven fruit juice concentrates, including Meyer lemon and pomegranate, and a line of eight different cocktail mixers, including a chipotle sour and red sangria, as well as seven different freeze-dried fruit garnishes, among them the dragon fruit crumble and pineapple pieces.

“We are launching a new line of syrups this year,” Garcia said. “And those are definitely more culinary inspired. We’re doing a yuzu, a juniper-thyme, a honeysuckle orange blossom, a plum gochu and then a straight passion fruit and a straight blood orange. Those will be really new for us because they are shelf-stable syrups, which is something we’ve never offered before.”

Those syrups, slated for release in early March, will also be easier to ship and store.

“Just to be able to give good fruit-based flavor in another format, and a consistent flavor too, that’s also shelf-stable, well, that’s really exciting for us,” Garcia said.

Garcia acknowledges that there are many fruit syrups already out there, but she thinks Perfect Purée of Napa Valley has an edge.

“It tastes basically like our fruit puree just in the form of a syrup, which is exactly what we want to deliver,” Garcia said.

And if almost 40 years in the wholesale market is any indication, it just might give them a leg up on the competition, no matter what time of year it is.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com

Smoked Tamarind Margarita

Ingredients

2 ounces Santo Spirits Mezquila

1 ounce good-quality triple sec (Cointreau, Combier, etc.)

1 ounce the Perfect Purée of Napa Valley tamarind puree (thawed)

1 ounce fresh-squeezed Meyer lemon juice

Tajin for rimming

Directions

Mix the first four ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well combined and strain over new ice in a Tajin-rimmed serving glass. If preferred, you may use the concentrate frozen and place all ingredients minus the Tajin in a blender. Starting on low, add ice until desired consistency is reached, then transfer to a Tajin-rimmed serving glass.

Note: This cocktail is adapted from a recipe in Santo owner and Marin resident Sammy Hagar‘s cocktail book, “Sammy Hagar’s Cocktail Hits.”