margaritas 101
How to make the perfect margarita just for you.
Balance
Any good cocktail has the right balance to it. Much like food, a balance dish means different things to different people based on their taste. While food has many different flavors to balance in cocktails, such as the margarita, the aim is to balance the sweet and sour. For our margarita we
Adding flavor
A muddler is a great tool to add seasonal flavor to your margarita. We suggest starting with the standard Tommy’s Margarita recipe (2oz tequila, 1 oz lime juice, 1/2 oz agave nectar) and muddling 4 pieces of whichever seasonal fruit you want to add. Our favorites are watermelon, mango, peach, pear, cantaloupe and kiwi. One inch cubes of each of these ingredients will be plenty per cocktail, if you want to make a large batch of a cocktail consider making a fruited agave syrup. To make fruited agave syrup mix 1 cup of fruit juice and 1 cup of agave nectar. Stir until combined, seal and refrigerate up to two weeks. You can easily turn any fruit into a juice by blending the fruit in a blender and gently pulsing until liquified, Blending on high for too long will actually heat up the liquid and cause the flavor to expire. After the fruit is liquified strain out the pulp. Depending on the fruit you may have a lot of leftover pulp. Don’t let it go to waste, you can mix it with a bit of water and freeze them into ice cubes to add an extra pop to your cocktails. Take one cup of the filtered fruit juice and mix it with one cup of agave nectar, stir until combined, seal and refrigerate for up to two weeks.
Spice it up.
The best way to add controlled spice is to use fresh pepper, usually jalapeño. Even while you may have created the perfectly balanced cocktail, the spice continues working as it sits in the drink. Meaning, the drink will continue getting spicier as the pepper sits in it. The best way to avoid this is straining it out after you shake using either a mesh strainer or cocktail strainer. We suggest starting with two nickel sized slices of fresh jalapeño and simply adding them to your margarita before you shake the cocktail. The shake will extract the flavor or the jalapeño without over extracting the spice. To achieve extra spice you can muddle the jalapeño slices before adding the other margarita ingredients.
