Hands up if you've had a frozen margarita! If the answer is no then you probably need to reevaluate
your life choices to be honest. This is arguably the most iconic of all of the frozen drinks and
was the first to have a slushy machine adapted helping to bring frozen drinks to the masses.
Cocktail lore is usually pretty imprecise to say the least but in this case the inventor
Mariano Martinez has had the history codified by the Smithsonian museum.
Growing up helping out at his father's Mexican restaurant he saw his dad whiz up the odd frozen
margarita for his patrons even though it was technically illegal in the state at the time but
they were exceedingly well received. When the laws had changed and Mariano decided to open his own
restaurant he put frozen margaritas on the menu. Unfortunately his bartender struggled to keep up
with demand and so the quality of the drinks was nowhere near what it should have been, to the
point that Mariano was going to take them off the menu but then the eureka moment while stopping at
a 7-11 he saw the slurpees and thought why don't i pre-mix my margaritas in a slushy machine.
So after a fair bit of tinkering on a second-hand soft-serve ice cream machine and on the recipe
itself to get the right texture and sweetness for it to work, on May 11th 1971 he pulled the
lever to pour the very first margarita slushy into a glass and the US has never looked back!
Now we don't actually have a slushy machine to hand here and i'm sure most of you don't at home
either so we're going to stick with the trusty blender but if we ever do get out on the road
i'd love to visit some of the bars here that are doing fun stuff with theirs so let me know in the
comments if that's something you'd like to see. As with all blended drinks you're going to want
this to be sweeter than your regular margarita recipe um so we're actually adding sugar syrup
here to help with the balance and consistency, you could definitely use something like agave instead.
It's usually, it's something that i don't usually suggest for margaritas but in this instance
it works and while i'll always advocate using good quality tequila the cold actually numbs your
flavor receptors meaning there's probably not much point using a particularly special bottle
so just something good value is the best choice. Tromba is our house pour tequila
at Bomba so we've stuck with that it's really delicious and it mixes easily with other flavors
so it provides a backbone without overpowering. Cointreau is a good option for the orange liqueur
because it's really bright and zesty but it still has a bit more sweetness than your more boutique
dry curacaos. So for the margarita with all these frozen drinks it's pretty um good to kind of have
a little bit of forethought obviously you always want to move pretty quickly when you're making
cocktails especially in a bar environment but with these ones you know, the second that it's kind of
sitting there everything's starting to come up to room temperature and that's sort of going to
not be quite the texture that you're looking for so we're going to get our garnish ready as per
usual first. Only at this point going to grab my tequila and the cointreau out of the freezer
and then i've already got my sugar syrup and lime kind of sitting just beside me here in the fridge.
So we're gonna go 60 mls of tromba i always like to use blanco tequilas for margaritas because it's
that bit kind of fresher. Tromba is just really good value for money it's a really delicious
quite kind of mellow and fruity and grassy tequila which is actually made by some guys um from here
in melbourne down in mexico which is pretty cool and then we're going to go 20 mls of orange
liqueur i'm going with cointreau it's that little bit kind of zestier and zingier but if it is only
kind of Grand Marnier or something a little bit heavier that you have to hand feel free to use
that as well. 15 mls of sugar syrup although it feels pretty weird to me putting added sweetener
into a margarita it does really need it for the balance but also just the texture it kind of
binds everything together quite nicely. And then 20 mls of lime juice i'm not going a full shot of
lime because you do have some zingy citrus flavors from the cointreau already because you do want to
lean to the sweeter side then about a cup of ice you can go sort of just under the smaller part
of your shaker tin full and that's about a good amount and although the ice here is fairly small
and the blender probably could handle it you know i don't want to put it under more pressure than it
has to be so i'm just going to get it started with a little bash with the mallet in a tea towel first
and that just goes in as well and then to whizz it up we're just going to start it off a little
bit slow for a bit until it kind of gets going and then nice and high literally just until all of the
ice is dissolved so kind of as soon as you can cut it then do so that it doesn't start to actually
heat up the liquid inside. Then grab your glass out of the freezer we are going to do
a salt rim on this even though obviously you're drinking through a straw it's maybe not strictly
necessary but it just doesn't really feel right to not put a salt rim on a margarita - just doing
it at the end so that the glass is still in the freezer for as long as possible.
Then we'll just go our little lime wheel and a straw. The frozen margarita - so now you know.
I better just give this a bit of a taste i do have to admit because i kind of obviously
explained things along the way it's definitely a little bit not quite as like creamy textured
as you would want but it still has that nice little kind of little kind of bubble going on
and it really tastes like a margarita like you just wouldn't think having that
much sweet in it that it would come anywhere close to the balance of a regular margarita
especially because i do tend to take mine you know pretty kind of dry and citrusy
but it's just like the tequila is really kind of present in there and you still got
more than enough acid from the lime juice even though there's not as much in there
100% refreshment!
yeah it needs a salt rim, may not be dainty but
definitely the tastiest way