How to Make Mixed Drinks With Tequila

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is JD Stubenberg. I'm one of the bar managers here at Jimmy Mak's in Portland, Oregon, a great jazz club. We like to make great cocktails as well. Today we're going to be talking about making cocktails with Tequila, one of my favorite liquors. Tequila is a product of the agave plant coming from Mexico for the most part. It comes in a variety of styles, a variety of prices as well. Making cocktails with Tequila, there is one thing you need to keep in mind cheap Tequila needs lots of help because cheap Tequila tastes very bad so you need to add lots of flavoring agents, sugars and syrups and all those kind of fun things so if you're going to be drinking Tequila you're better off going with a little better quality, spend a little more money and you're going to get a better result in the end, better cocktails and less hangovers as well which is always nice. Probably the famous Tequila cocktail there is is the Margarita and even though it's been made a million times by a million different people in a million different fashions it is still one of my favorite drinks and one of our signature drinks here as well as our 221 Rita so that's what were going to make for you today. Salt or no salt. Some people prefer to have salt on a Margarita on the rim, some people do not like to have it. I personally don't like it, however, as a general rule of thumb you always make a Margarita with salt unless a customer tells you they don't want to have it. So we're going to make it with salt today so you can see how it's done. You are going to take your serving glass, a lime, run the lime around the rim of the glass. This puts some lime juice on to it which will make salt stick to the glass itself. As you can see we have got a nice thick layer of salt around the rim there. O'kay I am going to set that aside for a second. Get your mixing glass out. Now in making Margaritas, typically I tend to try to avoid using sugar but most Americans need a little bit of a sweeter style of a drink and here at Jimmy Mak's we don't use premade sour mixes or any of that kind of stuff. It's all made from scratch. As a result we have to kind of bump this up with a little bit of sugar to make it palatable for most normal people, me not being normal, I don't like sugar but we're going to put the sugar in there today just so you understand how it works. Two cubes please. We're going to cover this with a mixture of lime juice and orange juice. This is a ratio of two to one lime juice to OJ. The orange juice is the real essential ingredient here. A lot of people don't use it but in making a good Margarita orange juice provides a natural sweetener that will off set the sourness and the tartness of the lime. Again as we were talking about sugar earlier you can get away without making, without using sugar for this cocktail but if you need to sweeten it a little bit which is what we're going to start with today, a little bit of sugar helps. So as far as how much we're going to use, just enough to cover up both cubes of sugar, approximately an ounce and a half to two ounces thereabouts. Once that is covered, take your muddler out and you are going to crush this sugar up so it breaks it up which will make it easier to dissolve as you are shaking your cocktail later on. O'kay that will give you a really good sour base to make a Margarita. This is also a great sour base to use for all sorts of other cocktails, Kamikazes, all sorts of things like that. So, now again we're going to use plenty of ice, fill your mixing glass all the way to the rim with ice, start out with a decent quality Tequila at the very least, however, you don't want to use super premium Tequilas in making Margaritas. Why? Because it's a waste of really good money. Unless you have more money than you know what to do with or if you have a real particular flavor or you have a customer for your bartender who really demands that I have to have Petronan Yaho at fifty some odd dollars a bottle in my Margarita, knock yourself out. They're paying for it, it's their choice. For myself personally and as a home bartender I prefer Salsalitos. It's a repasala which means it has been aged for one year. It is a very good quality Tequila without spending a lot of money and it makes great Margaritas. It is great by itself, straight up, it's great on the rocks. It's great with everything so that's what we are going to use today. We are going to start out with about two ounces of Salsalitos Tequila. There we go. We are going to add to this Triple Sec. What is Triple Sec? Triple Sec is a Brandy of orange liquor. It is predominantly sugar. This is a great sweetening agent. It is used in all sorts of different kind of cocktails. By itself it is a little too sweet to drink on its own. If you take Triple Sec to the next higher level you'll get into things like Quantro or Grand Manya. They are the same basic concept. They are brandies as well. They just have more oomph to them and more particular flavors. Grand Manya is something that is used very typically in what they call a Cadillac Margarita as a float. It kind of blows up the orange essences of the drink. Many higher level bars will use Quantro as opposed to Triple Sec as a sweetening agent. In our case we're just going to stick with the Triple Sec because it is nice and simple. So about one ounce of Triple Sec and you are in good shape. Again cocktail shaker on top of your mixing glass, get a good seal and shake it vigorously. You have got to break that sugar down. O'kay now the whole puppy can go right back up there, look at that it's perfect. Now we're going to garnish this of course with a straw make that easier for sipping or people can drink it right off the rim to get that salt as well and a good squeeze of lime just to add that extra little kick and a little bit of color there as well and now you have a classic 221 Margarita. Alright so we've made ourselves a wonderful 221 Margarita. This is the classic example of a great Tequila cocktail. Again the good rule of thumb when using Tequila for making drinks is use a quality product. However, don't go over board. If you're going to be buying super premium Tequilas, drink those straight. They're just fine by themselves. They don't need any help."