How to Make Strawberry Long Island Ice Tea

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is JD Stubenberg. I am one of the bar managers here at Jimmy Mak's Jazz Club in Portland, Oregon and today we are going to be talking about the legendary Long Island Ice Tea and all of its different variations one of which in particular is a Strawberry Long Island Ice Tea. So let's start with the basics. Your fundamental Long Island Ice Tea starts with your four whites. This is what bartenders refer to it as Vodka, Gin, Triple Sec and White Rum or Light Rum as it were. Then you add to that a sweet and sour, whether it is a prepackaged mix or something you make from scratch and then the traditional Long Island is finished off with a shot of cola. Beyond that you can do all sorts of different things. If you're going to do a Strawberry Long Island Ice Tea you can use either one of two fashions to do this, a strawberry puree or you can use a strawberry syrup. Purees and/or fresh strawberries are wonderful in that you are using fresh ingredients. The only problem is that they tend to be very tart. They require a lot of sugar to off set the tartness of the fresh fruit and that can be kind of difficult to work with and make your drink overall a big mess. So using syrups even though I am not necessarily a big fan of syrups is actually the cleaner and safer more practical route to go with. So let's start with looking at the basic Long Island Ice Tea and then we'll talk about where it goes from there. So we're going to start out with our shaker, excuse me with our mixing glass and then we'll get to our shaker in a second. Making a fundamental sour mix. We've talked before about making sours, using juice and using premixes. Here at Jimmy Mak's we like to make our sours from scratch. We're going to start out with two cubes of sugar. This is your sweet and we're going to add to this a mixture of lemon and orange juice. You could just use straight lemon juice here with the sugar and you're going to be just fine. That makes a wonderful sweet and sour. We like to have a little bit of orange juice in there as well because the orange brings out a natural sweetness that kind of counter balances the overwhelming like fructose sweetness that comes from sugar. So what we use is a mixture of lemon and OJ. It is actually a three to, what is it, a two to one ratio, no it is a three to two ratio of lemon juice to orange juice so we're going to use just enough again to cover both sugar cubes like so. You get your muddler out, this is the fun part, break your sugar up in there, that way it will dissolve as you shake it. Then again plenty of ice, fill yourself all the way up to the rim and again four whites, Vodka, Gin, Rum and Triple Sec in equal parts. In a typical cocktail you want to be using about a half an ounce of each so you get about two ounces of liquor all totaled in the cocktail and we'll start out with our Vodka and Gin then a little Triple Sec and Rum. Now you have the fundamental beginnings of a Long Island. To finish an actual Long Island you would add cola to this which we are going to do here in just a second. Get your shaker on top, good firm seal, get your receptacle ready, give it a shake. Again you are trying to develop sugar so shake it vigorously, break your seal. Now pour in and add a little splash of cola and right there you have a Long Island Ice Tea. Now this get garnished with a lemon because the lemon is kind of your fundamental ingredient there and you have a real pretty cocktail. O'kay so now we have your basic Long Island Ice Tea, your four whites, sweet sour and cola. There's a lot of variations of Long Island Ice Tea as well which basically remove the cola and replace it with another sort of flavoring and coloring agent. You could use Midori which gives it a green hue and that's called a Tokyo Tea. You could use cranberry juice which of course is going to turn it red, that's called the Long Beach Ice Tea. You could even back up another step and actually add Tequila, white Tequila to the original mix as well as the cola and then you have a Texas Tea. In some cases people will add Shambora to this mix which is a raspberry fromwa and that would make it into a Black Opal or Black Pearl depending on what part of the country you are in. In the case of making a Strawberry Long Island Ice Tea which is what people have been asking about, you can either use a strawberry puree or you can use a strawberry syrup which is what we talked about before. A strawberry puree is wonderful because they are natural and it's going to have more natural flavor. The problem with them is that they tend to be very tart so you are going to have a lot of sugar to off set that and get that natural fruit flavor to come out and for simplicity's sake and practicality you are a lot better off using a strawberry syrup, a torani syrup or something along those lines because it's going to dissolve better, it's going to mix better and the flavor overall will be more consistent but in any event it's a great cocktail for the perspective that it will get you started along the right direction of a night of drinking. As far as flavor goes, that's up to you to decide but this is your basic Long Island Ice Tea."