How to Serve Acai

The Acai berry is the fruit of the Acai Palm. This is a species of palm trees native to Central and South America.  The tree grows over 13 feet in height and bears big dark purple berries. The fruit produces twice yearly and just one tree usually produces thousands of the berries. It is native to the Amazon rainforest and indigenous Brazilians have been using it to treat ailments and support recovery from illness for thousands of years. The Acai berry is so nutritious that it has been known to sustain the indigenous peoples of the Amazon through times of famine. The fruit is small, purple and perfectly round; about one inch in circumference.

 

The berries are also powerful anti-inflammatories that can help reduce pain and soreness and anecdotal evidence suggests that they also act as a mild anti-depressant.

 

The Acai berry also contains anthocyanins, fiber, plant sterols, and both omega 6 and omega 3 essential fatty acids. Acai also contains five hundred times more vitamin C than oranges, making it a valuable anti-aging food. It also promotes weight loss.  They are one of the few fruits that contain most of the amino acids that comprise a full protein.

 

You can find Acai juice quite easily in most grocery stores but be sure to check labels to make sure it is not “cut” too heavily with other juices such as grape or apple.

The most common Acai product available is the frozen pulp but once again be sure to read labels to make sure that there is no sugar added.  Acai should be the first ingredient on the label and not sugar or some other kind of fruit or additive.

The raw berries are mostly available in organic or specialty markets, organic and health food markets and in Asian or Far Eastern markets.

Acai is sold either as fresh raw berries, as a frozen berry or pulp and as a powder.

 

The Acai berry is 90% seed and only 1% of the berry is actually edible. That is why it is often sold only as a puree of skin and pulp that is frozen.

 

If you are making a sherbet or other frozen dessert than using the frozen pulp or frozen berries may shorten the chilling time for the desert.  The quality or the taste of the berry is not affected at all by freezing.

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More Ideas and Tools for Making Creative Cocktail Garnishes

You can be the hostess with the mostest if you know how to make cocktail garnishes that really impress. There are a couple of very cool tools that you will need to create really attractive cocktail garnishes.  The first is a really good bar knife and the second is a paring knife.

 

With the bar knife you can cut fruit and vegetables into any shape you want.  The paring knife is used to make citrus rind curls called corkscrew twists

 

Corkscrew twists have almost become the measure of what makes a bartender more then a bartender, but rather a bartender chef!  The longer your rind curls, the defter you are considered to be with the knife.  A rind curl is a long spiral, slinky shaped piece of rind that can be dropped right into the cocktail or draped on the side of it.  Basically, you use your paring knife to peel the rind from the fruit and keep peeling from the top around from the bottom to achieve the longest “slinky” shape you can. Some bars serve rind curls that are four to six inches long!

 

Your paring knife can also be used to shave chocolate curls into a chocolate drink or cucumber curls into a martini.

 

Another trend is to feather the ends of vegetables such as celery and carrots before you stick them in Bloody Caesars or Bloody Mary’s or fashion them into a kind of a spear that you can then use to stab an olive or cherry tomato.

 

If you are really creative, you can also make cookie cutters part of your cocktail garnish tool set. Small cookie cutters can be pressed into any vegetable that is sliced laterally and flat enough so that you can create a shape.

 

Another imaginative way to garnish your drinks is to freeze the garnish inside ice cube trays and then throw them into the drink. This especially works well with small bead like fruits such a cranberries, blueberries, raspberries, melon balls and olives.

 

To make your own flavored sugars to “frost” your specialty cocktails all you need to do is mix up three tablespoons of a liqueur, beverage or other flavoring to one cup of sugar and crush it to a fine dust in a blender.  For instance if you wanted to make a cranberry frosting for cosmopolitans you would add three tablespoons of Cranberry juice cocktail to one cup sugar. To make a lemon frosting, add three-table spoons lemonade. Then use the dust to rim your glass!

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