Insanely Good Margarita || Crazy Delicious Drinks

Well hey, today in the shop. We're not in the shop because it is time for our monthly drink video. That's right, I said monthly. You guys liked the last one so much that I decided to do one of these every single month. As always the recipes will be in the video description along with links to my website where you can get merchandise and woodworking plans and t-shirts, motivational posters, all that stuff. Today I'm going to be showing you how to make a drink that for the longest time I absolutely hated, and that's the margarita. I just used to think they were gross, probably because I only ordered them in cheap sleazy bars and they were made pretty terribly. So I'm going to show you how to make two different margaritas today. One is going to be the classic margarita with a little twist that's just going to make it so much better. And the second is going to be a seasonal margarita that I only make in the spring to beginning of summer and I'll show you why here in just a second. So let's get started. Now the first thing we're going to do is we're going to make our own sweet and sour mix. That is the key. I guess you'd call it margarita mix, sweet and sour mix, whatever you want to call it. Now the reason I used to hate margaritas is like I said I'd only order them in sleazy bars and all they do is take a pre-packaged, pre-made sweet and sour margarita mix, throw it in a glass with some ice cubes, add some tequila, and they call it a margarita. What I'm talking about is this kind of garbage that you find in the grocery store. It's just gross. It's super sweet, it doesn't taste very good, and it makes a horrible margarita. And making your own margarita mix isn't that difficult. So I'm going to show you how. That's step number one. So what we're going to do is we're just going to slice a bunch of limes, okay. You're going to need, I don't know, two, three, four, it depends how many margaritas you're making. So once you slice them you're going to take a juicer, I just like this little hand one here, and you're just going to juice, juice, juice away. Now I like to really pulverize the limes as I do this because I like to get some of that thick pulp into the juice. It just gives a little more body and texture to the actual drink. So you just keep going until you've got a nice amount of juice in the bottom of your juicer. Also if your limes have a lot of seeds in them, I like to just take a spoon and pick out the seeds. But I think we're lucking out here, we don't have a lot of seeds going on. Alright, we've got plenty of lime juice there. Like I said, it doesn't really matter how much you make, it depends on how many margaritas you're making. I like to just make a whole bunch that way I can have more than one margarita and I only have to make it one time. So once you get your limes all juiced and you have a good amount of juice, we're going to want to measure out how much lime juice we're actually dealing with here. Because depending on how much lime juice is, that's going to tell us how much sugar to add to it. So I'm just going to pour this in this little measuring cup. Looks like we're right at four ounces. So I'm going to pour that into my little mixing tumbler here. Now this says Rose's Simple Syrup, it's not. I used this bottle because I had a giant jug of agave syrup and it was hard to pour out of, so I poured it in here. Whenever I'm making margarita mix or sweet and sour and I'm using it for a margarita, I like to use agave syrup. Call me crazy, but tequila is made from agave, agave syrup is made from agave. It just makes sense to keep it all in the same family. If you don't have agave syrup, use simple syrup. It'll taste practically the same, but I just like to stick with tradition. So I know there is four ounces of lime juice in here, so we're going to add half that amount of agave syrup, which means two ounces. Pour it in here and mix it up. That's it. This is our margarita mix. Nothing more, nothing less. You don't have to get complicated. There's no added coloring or citric acid. All you need is lime juice, sweetener, and it's going to be delicious. But we're not going to stop there. Now you could just take this and mix it with tequila, call it a margarita. So let's talk about what type of tequila you should be using in your margarita. It's really going to depend on your flavor preference. You could use a blanco tequila like this, which is clear. There's some great blanco tequilas out there. This is Codigo, Codigo, I don't know. But I like this stuff. I bought it at my local liquor store. Don't know much about it, but it tastes good. It's clear. If you want to use a brown tequila, that typically means that it's barrel aged. That's where it gets its brown coloring from. There are tequilas on the market that are brown that are total crap. Jose Cuervo, for example, it's brown. It shouldn't be. It was never aged in a barrel. They just add some caramel color to make it look that way. So make sure if you're getting brown tequila, it's good. 100% agave, barrel-aged stuff. I like Don Julio. It's a little bit more expensive, but it's a great tequila. So that's what we're going to use for this margarita. All right, so now that we have our margarita mix, we're going to start making our margarita. So we're going to need a glass. Now here is where we enter a highly debated topic, and that is to salt the rim or to not salt the rim. Some people are staunchly against an unsalted margarita. They'll tell you it's not really a margarita unless you got salt looped around the rim. This is where I draw the line. Drinking alcohol is all about enjoying the drink in your hand. So if you like salt on your margarita, put flipping salt on there. And if you don't, leave the salt off. Personally, I love a good salty rim on my margarita. So before we start pouring stuff in here, we're going to prepare our glass. Now if you've never salted a rim before, it's insanely easy. All you're going to do is cut a lime wedge like this. Then you're going to slice it right down the middle, just making a nice little happy face. Then you're going to take your glass, and you're going to put the lime wedge on there and spin it all the way around until you got a nice ring of lime juice all the way around the top of your glass. Then with your glass nice and coated in the lime juice, you're just going to take a little dish of salt, and you're going to dunk it in there. Spin it around. You're trying to get a nice even coat, just like that. Now it's important you do this obviously before you put the ice in the glass, because if you put the ice in there first and then try it, your ice is going to in your salt. You don't want that to happen. So put the salt on first. Then I just take my lime wedge, and we're just going to use that as a garnish. Boom. Margarita glass. Next, we are going to take our Don Julio, and we're going to measure out two ounces. Pour that in there. And here is the secret ingredient that will make your margarita delicious. Grand Marnier. This is a cognac-based orange liqueur, and it will take your margarita from being good to flipping amazing. You can get a ton of different orange liqueurs, but Grand Marnier is one of my favorite because it doesn't taste just like you're drinking a bunch of sugar. And you're just going to put a half an ounce of Grand Marnier in the bottom of the glass there. Perfect. Just like that. Now with our tequila and Grand Marnier in the bottom of the glass, we're going to add very carefully a little bit of ice. Don't overdo it because you need room left for our margarita mix. Then we're going to take two ounces of margarita mix and pour that on top. Then we're just going to give it a little stir, mix around that alcohol and margarita mix, and get it nice and cold. And there you have it. A classic margarita with just the little twist of Grand Marnier. Let's give it a taste. It's exactly how it should be. Simple, not overly sweet. You can really taste the tequila coming through. It's just awesome. And the Grand Marnier. Start putting that in your margaritas. It's flipping fantastic. It's a good thing we made ourselves that drink because we're going to need it while we make the next one. This is a seasonal margarita, meaning that the main ingredient needed for this margarita only grows part of the year. But it is absolutely my favorite margarita of all time. But before we can make that, we're going to have to take a little trip outside to the garden to get our ingredients. So follow me. Well, I know you can't follow me, but I'm going to leave like I'm leaving the scene, and then the next scene will cut to you already be out there. I'll move the camera. Just kidding. Welcome to my garden. Now, we haven't planted a lot yet because it's still spring, so we'll be getting the garden really going here in the next couple weeks. But one thing that comes up early, especially in Oregon, is rhubarb. Rhubarb is my love language. I think rhubarb is one of the most delicious things on the planet. It's sweet, it's sour, it's tangy, and believe it or not, it makes an amazing margarita. So what we're going to do is harvest some of this rhubarb. We're going to take it inside, use it to make a rhubarb simple syrup that will become our margarita mix, and make the most delicious margarita that you've ever tasted. So let's cut off a few stalks here. Maybe one more. Now, it's important to note if you're using rhubarb, we're just using the stalks. The leaves, they're poisonous, so you don't want those, okay? I mean, it would probably take a lot of them to kill you, but don't eat the leaves. They're toxic. You just want the stems. All right, welcome back to the kitchen. Just like that, I was out there, but now I'm in here because movie magic. So I've already taken the time to pre-wash our rhubarb. You want to do that because, you know, there's birds pooping out there and dirt, and I don't want that in my margarita. I don't think you do either. So after washing it, we're just going to dice this up just like you're dicing up celery into small uniform pieces, and then we're going to throw it on the stove to simmer. So let's get this chopped up. Now you want all this to break down, so you don't want too big of chunks, but as it breaks down, it's going to kind of turn into a pulp. So you want it big enough that you're still going to get some of that pulp. We're going to need a cup of freshly cut rhubarb for this simple syrup. So we'll just cut all this up and see where it gets us. Rhubarb's like my favorite smell. It just smells so good and it tastes even better. So once you get all your rhubarb diced up, we're going to measure out a cup. Man, I cut way too much. You know what? Let's just double the recipe. Extra syrup is awesome because you can put it on ice cream, you can make more margaritas. Then you're going to take a stock pot and dump it in there. So we'll just do two cups. So we'll double everything. So two cups of freshly cut rhubarb, and then you're going to do equal parts of sugar. So one cup of sugar and two cups of sugar. And then you're going to do equal parts of water as well. So two cups of sugar, two cups of rhubarb, two cups of water. Now we're going to take this over to the stove and we're going to let it start breaking down. Now the key here at the start is to just keep stirring it constantly because you don't want any of that sugar to stick to the bottom and burn. But what we're going to do is bring this to a boil and then once it starts to boil, we're going to reduce the heat down to just a simmer. And you're just going to let it simmer for about oh 15-20 minutes, just enough so that that rhubarb starts breaking down and just kind of folds into the rest of the liquid. So now that we've got that going, we're just going to let this sit and do its thing and we'll come back when it's ready. If only there was something we could do while we waited. This has been simmering for oh 15-20 minutes and as you can see all that rhubarb has started to break down. There's still a few little chunks in there but that's exactly what we want because we want those chunks in our drink. It gives it a nice pulpy delicious texture. So we're going to take this off the heat now. We're going to set it aside and just let it cool. It's a hard thing. You just got to wait. You don't want to pour this piping hot simple syrup in your margarita or else it's going to melt all your ice. So I know it's difficult but you just have to be patient. Now that our syrup is sufficiently cooled, we can dump it into a bottle to store. This gets a little tricky because there's so much pulp in that rhubarb it's hard to get it through the funnel. So I like to just take a little poker and help it through. All right now that our rhubarb simple syrup is made we are ready to go on to margarita number two. Like I said once this is cooled I like to put it in a bottle and store it in the fridge. This will last oh probably two weeks just fine in the fridge. I honestly don't know because it never lasts that long. I'm always done with it in like a day and a half because it's so flipping good. So before we construct our margarita we're going to prepare our glass and we're going to do this just a little bit differently. I'm going to use a highball glass for this one just because let's make it fancy shall we. So we're going to start the same way we're going to take a lime wedge cut it in half and we're going to wet the top of our glass. But instead of using salt for the rim of this glass we're going to change things up a little bit. I don't know what it is I just don't think salt and rhubarb go together that well. So we're going to rim it with sugar but we're going to do it a little bit differently. So we're going to take a little dish and we're going to add some sugar to it. Just a few nice heaps in there. Then we're going to take some of this. Now don't freak out this small bag of powder is not what you're thinking. It's citric acid okay. Citric acid just has a nice really sour bite to it. So we're going to take about oh maybe half a teaspoon of citric acid and we're going to mix it in with our sugar. The closest thing I can correlate this to is the coating that's on the outside of a sour patch kit. It tastes exactly like that. It's just a really good flavor to pair with the already tart rhubarb just goes really nice. So we're going to mix that up. We've already got our glass nice and moistened so we're just going to run that around in there. Get a nice sugar coating on the top of the glass. Then we're going to plop on our lime wedge garnish and we're going to pour our tequila. Now I'm going to do this exactly the same way as I did the other margarita because it's a perfect combination. We're going to do two ounces of Don Julio and we're going to do a half an ounce of Grand Marnier. Pour that in there and add our ice. Then we're going to take our freshly made rhubarb syrup and we're going to add two ounces. But we're not done yet. Even though this is rhubarb syrup, rhubarb is tart, it's still pretty sweet because of all the sugar we added. So just like in our last margarita we're going to add a little lime juice on top. So again just juice a few limes. You don't need a ton and we're going to add one ounce of lime juice. Stir that all together and you are going to have one of the most delicious margaritas you have ever tasted. The perfect rhubarb margarita made fresh from the garden. Oh my gosh. I can't even describe it to you guys. It's just, it's just that flipping good. All you're going to have to do, you're going to have to go make it yourself. There's just no other way you're going to experience this. If you don't have a rhubarb plant growing in your garden, well that's okay. Go to your local grocery store anytime between late April, end of June, beginning of July. You're going to find fresh rhubarb and you can make this at home. It is so good and it's not that hard. Well worth it. I hope you enjoyed that video. Like I said, I'm going to be doing one of these a month. So stay tuned for more drink videos next month and of course next week I will be back in the wood shop doing my regular woodworking routine. So I'll see you next week. Check the video description for the recipes and links to everything you saw me use in this video. I'm going to finish this and then maybe take a nap.