We Ask Monin’s Stasha Johnston About Mixing with Yuzu Purée

Since the company’s founding in 1912, Monin’s commitment to creating the highest-quality flavorings for beverages, cocktails, coffees, and cuisine continues. The company’s practice of staying atop current food and beverage industry trends, menu placements, and more contributes to their success in developing mouthwatering flavors that inspire bartenders and chefs.

 

 

Today, Monin continues to build on their history of innovation and bring unique, on-trend flavorings to market. We asked Senior Vice President of Marketing Stasha Johnston what bartenders should know about mixing with Monin’s Yuzu Purée.

Talk to us about Yuzu Purée.

Monin Yuzu Purée is made with authentic ingredients and offers a beautiful, premium recipe replacement for lemon or lime. With a flavor reminiscent of grapefruit, lemon and sour mandarin, our clean label Yuzu Purée brings subtle floral notes and a tart citrus texture to cocktails, mocktails, lemonades, iced teas and an endless number of drink creations. It’s also great on the culinary side in dressings, marinades, and desserts.

What inspired Monin’s creation of this product?

We wanted to create an easy way for bartenders and chefs to incorporate authentic, delicious fruit flavors into their beverage and culinary creations. Depending on time of year and location, fresh yuzu can be difficult to find. Our Yuzu Purée offers consistency, convenience, and bold flavor all year round. Plus, it’s a relatively unique flavor in the market and even somewhat novel on the operator menuing side. Having an easy to use and accessible flavor like this can help our operator customers innovate and differentiate their menu offering from the rest.

 

Yuzu is a hot flavor this year. Tell us more.

Asian-inspired flavors continue to enjoy popularity in North America, as part of the larger trend of globalization within food and beverage menus. From fast casual to fine dining, we’re seeing more adoption of yuzu in beverage and culinary recipes. Yuzu lives at the intersection of sweet, floral, and slightly tart, which tracks with increased interest in bitter and citrus flavors among consumers. Yuzu is elegant and complex, but with enough similarity to other citrus fruits to feel accessible.

 

How are bartenders using Yuzu Purée?

The flavors of Yuzu are both mysterious and familiar, so we are seeing riffs on classics like the Yuzu Collins or Yuzu Margaritas. It is an amazing ingredient to add depth of flavor and complex citrus notes to any drink.

 

What would you like bartenders to know about Monin and its purée line?

Monin has created a toolbox of amazing flavors that help our customers build the inventive drinks they dream up. Our purées don’t require thawing, refrigeration, or muddling, which makes for easy prep and storage. For flavors that are traditionally difficult to extract, like yuzu or banana, our purée line offers bartenders an easy solution to achieving a bold, premium taste full of real fruit and balanced sweetness.

 

What would you like bartenders to know about mixing with Yuzu?

Our Yuzu Purée is like a Swiss army knife for bartenders, it has so many uses. Add it to frozen drinks like frozen yuzu lemonade or experiment pairing it with rich flavors like olive oils or savory marinades. Yuzu can be a showstopping ingredient when you let it shine in a cocktail or mocktail.

 

 

Yuzu Tonic

Ingredients:

• 1 oz. Monin Yuzu Purée
• 2 oz. grapefruit juice
• ½ oz. fresh lime juice
• Tonic water (to top)

Preparation: Fill glass with ice. Pour ingredients into glass in order listed. Pour mixture into mixing tin and back into serving glass to mix. Garnish with grapefruit wedge.

 

---

 

Yuzu Paloma

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ oz. Mezcal
• ½ oz. Monin Yuzu Purée
• ½ oz. fresh lime juice
• Grapefruit soda (to top)

Preparation: Combine ingredients in shaker in the order listed except soda. Cap and shake vigorously. Strain into chilled glass. Top with sparkling beverage garnish with grapefruit and lime slices.