Posted on: Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Enjoy a genuine margarita, mai tai
| • | Lessons from a master drink mixer |
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor
Mixologist Dale DeGroff says most people have never drank a proper mai tai or margarita.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser There's an interesting historical reason for this: When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the profession of bartender had been tainted by its association with gangsters and violence and there were few trained bartenders left. Commercial mixers were created as a response to the lack of training; "an insurance policy against all the unskilled labor," DeGroff said.
A proper mai tai offers layers of flavor. Using good-quality ingredients is important. The rum should be anejo — that is, aged. Bacardi's 8-year-old rum, 12-year old Mount Gay or Barbinet Haitian 5-year-old are all options). A nice touch is to "float" — gently poured over the top — of "overproof" rum, very strong rum made with demorara sugar, such as Bacardi 151. Here's the recipe.
MAI TAI
Fill a chilled cocktail shaker with ice and pour lime juice, orgeat, curacao and aged rum over the ice. Fill a large old-fashioned glass with ice and strain mai tai ingredient into glass. Gently pour a splash of ice over the top. Garnish with vanda orchid and sugar cane stick, if desired.
The slushee-style, super-sweet, fruit-flavored margaritas most of us know bear little resemblance to the original drink, which is a piquant, deceptively light and summery-tasting concoction. The secret is fresh-squeeze lime juice (not lemon), a really good orange liqueur and high-quality, 100 percent blue agave tequila.
DeGroff can lecture by the day on tequila, the fastest-growing spirit in America today. It's a complex subject more akin to wine than spirits in that the flavors of the various tequilas are greatly influenced by where the agave plant is grown and how the spirit is aged. The agave is a spiky-leafed member of the lily family (not a cactus as widely believed).
• • • For his margaritas, DeGroff prefers Cointreau for its lighter flavor.
DeGroff uses only kosher salt, never iodized — which is harsh-tasting and creates too strong a salt flavor on the glass rim. To salt-rim a glass, he pours some kosher salt in a flat dish, cuts a wedge of lime to the desired width and runs the lime around the outside perimeter of the glass, only half-way round the glass (so you can avoid the salt if you want to). He then carefully rolls the outside edge of the glass in salt.
DeGroff said tequila is not an easy mixer; it's a very assertive flavor — green, minerally and vegetal. The sweet-sour margarita is an appropriate foil for the liquor. You can use a little simple syrup (sugar dissolved in water in 1 to 1 proportion) if you prefer the drink sweeter.
CLASSIC MARGARITA
Fill shaker with ice and pour lime juice, Cointreau, tequila and simple syrup (if using) over ice. Shake and strain into chilled martini glass or champagne balloon.
To make a blended version, use 1 ounce lime juice and double the simple syrup and process in blender with handfuls of ice until desired consistency is reached.
A mai tai, he said, should be made with fresh juices, the proper cordial and good rum. Most mai tais today are made with prepared sweet and sour mixers and eliminate the cordial, orgeat (OR-zjhee-at), an Italian almond syrup, altogether. The result is a homogenized, one-note flavor, DeGroff said, and an artificial one, at that.
Slushee-style, super-sweet, fruit-flavored margaritas bear little resemblance to the original drink.
