The Best PINA COLADA I've Ever Tasted! (Essential Cocktails 45/50)

There aren't many drinks as evocative as a pina colada. It's got the power to take you from whatever you're doing, immediately, on holiday, sitting on a deck chair, sipping these in the sun and there are so many bad pina colada recipes but I do think this one is the best I've ever tried. So without further ado let's get on to our holidays, close your eyes, take yourself to a happy place and let's make some pina coladas. So the pina colada is a ridiculously well-known cocktail but I do think it often gets away without being quite perfect because it's always enjoyed in good locations, by the pool, on a sun lounger, having a great time and you're in a good mood. So you might excuse the fact that this drink is either too sweet, too kind of artificial, almost like liquid sun cream or kind of a slushy rather than being a cocktail because you're having a good time and that's totally fine but if you add a great drink on top of that experience it takes it to a whole new level and this recipe I'm going to show you today I think is on point and I'm really really happy with it. So for our pina colada we're going to need a few things, the first of which being rum and with rum you can choose a rum that you enjoy. If you don't love rum you can perhaps go for a white rum or an aged white rum which is going to be a little bit more mild, allow the pineapple and coconut to really come through, whereas if you really like rum, like I do, you can go for a slightly more aged rum which has a bit more character and a bit more intensity. So I'm using Appleton Estee 8 which is a really nice balance of kind of a little bit of funk in there, some kind of tropical notes, a little bit of roasted pineapple and banana, right through to the more round kind of dark sugars so a little bit of butterscotch and caramel. So this is going to be my basis and then we're going to need the two key ingredients for pina colada which are going to be pineapple in the form of pineapple juice and coconut in the form of cream of coconut, ideally Coco Lopez cream of coconut which is a really authentic choice but you can use regular coconut milk if you can't get hold of this and then we're going to build around these flavours first of all with a bit of acidity using freshly squeezed lime juice and then I like to add a salt to this in the form of saline solution and this just brings it all together really nicely. So when it comes to making our pina colada I'm actually going to build this on scales because we're going to be blending the drink and jiggers are a little bit difficult when it comes to things like the Coco Lopez and particularly with the saline. This is a really finely balanced drink and I'm really happy with exactly how it turns out so I want to be quite accurate with this and scales are the perfect way to do that. So first of all we're going to start with our rum and I'm going 40 grams here and this is going to be our spirit base to the drink. I'm going to go 100 grams of good quality pineapple juice, you can use store-bought and get really good results but if you want to go to the next level you can use freshly strained pineapple juice either through a juicer or by blending it up and then straining it and if you didn't know pina colada actually directly translates as strained pineapple hence the inclusion of pineapple in the drink. If you want to use strained pineapple, delicious. With the Coco Lopez you want to give this a really good stir together because it does kind of separate in the can and then when you've done that you can add 50 grams straight into our blender cup and it looks a little bit gloopy but fear not because in the final drink this just brings that really nice creamy texture and loads of coconut flavour as well. So Coco Lopez is actually really quite sweet so we do need some acidity to balance this and I like to go for freshly squeezed lime juice which just balances out the cocktail really well and then finally actually quite a lot of saline solution, much more than I usually add which is going to be two grams made with one part salt, five parts water and this just stops the drink feeling overly sweet and sour and it brings it all together really nicely. So I think a lot of recipes now would just call for you to blend this up with ice, pour it into a glass and you've got your pina colada but when ice is such a critical ingredient in this drink, either being the difference between a kind of really thin drink versus a really kind of thick almost edible slushy, we do want to be quite precise with this. So I recommend adding 60 grams of ice here to get that perfect texture which is drinkable but also rich and creamy and luxurious. If you don't have a really high speed blender like a Nutribullet like this or if you're stick blending then I would actually recommend using the smaller ice so maybe crushed ice but because this is going to be really rapidly blended it's going to chill down nicely and the difference here is if you use really big cubes it's going to take a long time to break them down and chill the drink so you're actually going to add some heat as the liquid kind of gets the friction whereas if you use crushed ice it's going to be really efficient in chilling the drink and also blend up really easily. So I'm using cubes because this is a pretty high speed blender but ideally if you want to use crushed ice that's going to make things a little bit easier for you in your lower power blender. So we're just going to blend this up until it's all mixed together. You can actually hear when it's ready because the ice stops kind of clicking inside the blender. You can feel this is really really nice and cold and it's going to be perfectly diluted. Pour this into a nice chilled glass. Oh my god, the best drink ever. Serve it with the straw, garnish with some really nice dried pineapple for a nice elegant presentation and that for me is the perfect pina colada. Enjoy.