I’ve made similar fruit salads of cantaloupe, honeydew and watermelon many times. The watermelon agua fresca, in the glasses, is a new adventure for me.
Our test cook makes agua fresca, fruit salad
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“I love this drink,” taste tester and page designer Ashley Bringmann said earlier this week as she sipped a glass of watermelon agua fresca from the Times Leader test kitchen. “I could drink it every day.”
“I am very pro-fruit,” reporter Sam Zavada said, adding he knew even before sampling that he would enjoy both the fruit salad and agua fresca I’d brought to the newsroom.
“It’s refreshing,” reporter Jen Learn-Andes said of the drink. As for the salad, she said the way I’d used a melon baller to cut the watermelon, honeydew and cantaloupe brought back fond memories of family picnics when her mother used to make a similar salad.
So, why all the fruit this week?
Well, the sweet saga starts at last Thursday’s Farmers Market in Wilkes-Barre, where I spotted an abundance of melons at several stands. I bought a locally grown honeydew and cantaloupe, plus a watermelon that was larger than the other two combined.
I mixed melon balls from all three fruits into a colorful medley that I took to a Labor Day Weekend family picnic, but I still had more than half of the watermelon left.
So, early Tuesday morning, I went to Schiel’s Family Market on Hanover Street, grateful that they had reopened after last week’s flooding, and bought a cantaloupe and honeydew to make a new batch of fruit salad for the taste testers.
I figured it would be a kind of last hurrah for summer.
Mission accomplished, but I still had watermelon left over, most of it still in its rind. Then I found several recipes online for agua fresca, a refreshing fruit drink with Mexican roots that sounded perfect.
I scooped the remaining watermelon out of its shell, pureed it in a blender and added coconut water, as some bloggers recommend.
And when I noticed the canned coconut water had contained little pieces of coconut flesh, I ran all the liquid through the blender again, hoping news editor and taste tester Liz Baumeister, who is not a coconut fan, would find it less objectionable this way.
That seemed to work. Liz is a watermelon fan and enjoyed the drink.
Columnist Bill O’Boyle and reporter Margaret Roarty, meanwhile, are not watermelon fans and didn’t have much enthusiasm for either of my test kitchen offerings. But that’s OK. I can’t win them all
I’m not including a recipe for the salad, because the salad is just three kinds of melons, cut into bite size pieces, and mixed into a medley with no dressings or herbs or anything else added. But here is a recipe for the Watermelon Agua Fresca, from kitchentreaty.com, which I more or less followed. (I didn’t strain out all the pulp.)
Watermelon Agua Fresca
3 pounds seedless watermelon, cubed (about 5 cups)
4 cups coconut water
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice (from 1 medium lime)
Puree the watermelon in a blender. Place a fine-mesh sieve over a pitcher and carefully pour the pureed watermelon through the sieve. Discard pulp. Stir in coconut water and lime juice. Chill, covered, until cold – at least an hour. Serve over ice.
