A margarita is a great goldarn cocktail. It’s a little sweet. A little tart. A tiny bit dangerous. A tad bit fun.
So I am wholly supportive of you, Señor Home Bartender, if you want to stick with your tried-and-true recipe and make it until you meet your Dios.
Here’s the basic recipe I use, courtesy of the Death and Co. cocktail book.
Simple. Solid. And with just a touch of agave and that ¾ oz pour of Cointreau, (instead of that gross substitute Triple Sec) it’s sweet without being cloying. Cloying is a problem I have with many restaurant margaritas.
But, let’s say your life partner tells you it’s Taco Night, and she is cooking brisket and searing steak and making great looking fruit-and-vegetable salsas and generally being an all-around overachiever in the kitchen.
You need to step up your margarita game a little bit? Here are two easy ways to do so, both of them utilizing that most basic of liquids: Juice.
If you want to sex up said margarita, blood oranges are your new best friend. I have been using them in margaritas all winter. Blood orange season is basically over now, but we found some at Whole Foods last week and they still work great.
Squeezing a couple of blood oranges and using the juice in the margarita adds a layer of complex citrus that other oranges (in my experience) cannot match. I have made this recipe with navel oranges/cuties etc. It’s good. With blood orange, it’s great.
So, to rebalance the drink after adding a second citrus, I turn down the lime juice a bit, add a touch more agave and…wow. Seriously, wow. This is a good margarita.
Another note: I often use Espolon tequila for margaritas. It’s an affordable $25 bottle.
During the holiday season, if you are feeling jolly, you can substitute the agave on the rim of the Blood Orange Margarita for a cinnamon simple syrup and then rim the glass with cinnamon and sugar.
But blood orange is a winter fruit, and gets hard to find right around the time it feels like margarita season in the American Midwest. So, what to do?
My answer to that question is unsweetened pineapple juice and my best buddy mezcal.
For those of you not yet initiated into the cult, mezcal is also a Mexican spirit made from the agave plant. Our old pal tequila is actually a type of mezcal. But the mezcal I’m talking about here tends to be derived from agave at higher altitudes and then made lovingly in Mexican villages using methods remarkably similar to how they have been making it for centuries.
Mezcal took the craft cocktail world by storm roughly a decade ago, when leading American bottle slingers started getting the good stuff from Mexico and throwing it into drinks. The smell and taste of mezcal tends to be earthier, and in some cases far smokier than tequila. You can now buy it at Spirit World and most grocery stores.
I wouldn’t cheap out on a bottle of this stuff. I like Del Maguey and Alipus. I tend to buy the “pink” label Alipus San Andres at Spirit World for cocktailing – it’s roughly $50 – but you can for sure ask for help and they will walk you through your many options.
I adore mezcal, but have found that, in cocktails: A)too much of a good thing can be a bad thing and B)it pairs fantastically well with fruit.
That’s the reasoning behind my Pineapple Mezcal Margarita, and frankly you don’t need any more reasons. Just do it.
Play with the agave, especially, to dial in the taste to your specific taste buds. I wrote 1/2 oz in the recipe, for example, but actually tend to use a little bit less in this drink as I like to oh-so-slightly taste the burn.
There you have it. Two easy recipes that will add some boozy fun to Taco Tuesday. These are my gifts to you, and all you have to do in return is, for God sakes, throw away your Triple Sec and buy Cointreau. Cointreau is way better. I promise.
Pineapple Mezcal Margarita
By Matthew Hansen
Prepare a glass with a salted rim.
Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker, and shake over ice.
Strain and serve over ice.
If you prefer fresh pineapple juice, sub that for the bottled. Make sure your bottled juice is not sweetened, otherwise it will throw off the balance of the cocktail.
Adjust the Agave to your own personal taste. Matthew often uses less.
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare a glass with a salted rim.
Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker, and shake over ice.
Strain and serve over ice.
If you prefer fresh pineapple juice, sub that for the bottled. Make sure your bottled juice is not sweetened, otherwise it will throw off the balance of the cocktail.
Adjust the Agave to your own personal taste. Matthew often uses less.
One response to “Matthew’s three takes on the classic margarita”
Agree 100% on the Triple Sec. Cointreau is SO much better.