Watermelon margaritas


Mmmmmm

Last summer, a buddy of mine made watermelon margaritas when I was visiting. Normally, I'm rather dubious about improving drinks by making them more elaborate, especially by adding fruit. (I'm only pretty dubious, not as dubious as a bartender in an old bar on West Seventh Street in St Paul who once said, "No drink should have more than three ingredients. Counting the straw.") In fact, I wasn't dubious in this case since my buddy is very sound on the subject of booze. It turned out that they were fabulous; better even than I had expected them to be. It seems that watermelon pulp has just the right amount of flavor to compliment the taste of a properly made margarita.

According to me, an ordinary margarita is made like so:

    1 part lime juice
    1 part Grand Marnier or Cointreau orange liqueur
    2 parts tequila

    Serve over ice. Coarse salt on the rim of the glass is
    splendid if you like it.

    Note that that's lime juice that you get from squeezing
    limes. Not bottled stuff. Some folks will use triple sec
    for the orange liqueur but I think that the result is
    perceptibly less good.

That's a very good drink if you ask me. If you haven't had a margarita made that way recently, go and have a couple.

As for adding watermelon, you probably won't be able to use up an entire watermelon at once. That's fine because you can freeze the pulp for (as far as I can tell) as long as you want. Watermelon margaritas taste even better in February than they do in July.

All you need to do is to mash up the watermelon pulp and remove the seeds. (For some reason even watermelons sold here as "seedless" contain seeds, just fewer.) I've done the that by cutting up a watermelon into golfball-sized bits and squashing it through a colander with a potato-masher. I expect that there are less labor-intensive methods that would work equally well; I just happened to have a colander and a potato-masher handy. Once you have a bowl full of watermelon juice, freeze it in ice-cube trays and store the watermelon-cubes in your freezer in ziplock bags.

Two watermelon-cubes can be melted in my little microwave in about 30 seconds and that's just the right amount of watermelon to add to a margarita made as above. The result is remarkably good.

Posted: Mon - March 8, 2004 at 09:48   Main   Category: 

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