Creating Delicious Mexican-Inspired Cocktails: A Step-by-Step Guide

Just want to cut through the little segment and then just run your knife along the edge of the flesh you don't want to cut the peel so just make sure that you're getting as close as you can then just peel it off all right and you can just run the back of your knife down and it will take it right off and then all you have to do is twist and keep twisting and you're just making a little curly cue you have a lime twist all right i'm gonna put that right there all right

So, when it comes to preparing citrus peels for cocktails, the key is to remove as much of the bitter white pith as possible. To achieve this, start at the top of the peel and gently move the peeler back and forth. This motion helps to minimize the amount of white pith that's left behind, resulting in a less bitter cocktail. For example, when making a mezcal sour, it's essential to use this technique to remove as much of the bitter pith as possible.

Now, let's talk about preparing lime peels for cocktails. The process is similar to preparing orange peels, but with one key difference: the amount of white pith that's left behind. To achieve a more delicate flavor profile, it's better to use this technique when making cocktails like a tequila lime cooler or a mezcal sour.

Now that we have our citrus peels prepared, let's move on to creating some delicious Mexican-inspired cocktails. In this article, we'll be making four different drinks: an Awa Fresca with melon, a Horchata cocktail with rice, a Mezcal Sour, and a Tequila Lime Cooler.

To start, I'm going to take a strip of peel off both a lime and an orange. By using this technique, which involves starting at the top of the peel and gently moving it back and forth, we can minimize the amount of white pith that's left behind. This results in a less bitter cocktail with more delicate flavors.

Next, I'm going to squeeze some fresh lime juice into my cocktail shaker. If you have a reamer, use that – it makes the process much easier. For this particular recipe, I'll be using four halves of a lime, just to be safe. The acidity of the lime juice will help to balance out the smokiness of the mezcal and tequila.

Now, let's measure out some agave syrup. This sweetener is made from the juice of the agave plant and has a distinct flavor that pairs perfectly with the smokiness of tequila and mezcal. For this recipe, I'll be using half an ounce of agave syrup – feel free to adjust to taste.

With our ingredients measured out, let's add some ice to the shaker. This will help to chill the cocktail and prevent it from getting watered down. Now, place the lid on the shaker and give it a good shake.

To finish off the recipe, I'll be adding a couple of bitters to the shaker. These tiny drops of flavor can make all the difference in a cocktail, adding depth and complexity to the drink. For this particular recipe, I'll be using just a few drops – you can adjust to taste.

Now that our cocktail is ready, let's take a look at how it turns out. We've created a beautiful Mezcal Sour with a lovely balance of citrus flavors. The smokiness of the mezcal pairs perfectly with the sweetness of the agave syrup, making for a truly delicious drink.

Next up, we have a Tequila Lime Cooler recipe that's sure to impress your friends at your next barbecue or beach party. To make this refreshing cocktail, simply combine one cup of freshly squeezed lime juice and one cup of freshly squeezed lemon juice with two cups of tequila. Add some ice and stir well – you can garnish with slices of lemon and lime for a pop of color.

Finally, we have the Horchata cocktail recipe that's sure to become a favorite at your next gathering. This sweet and creamy drink is made with rice, cinnamon, and a hint of vanilla. To make it, simply combine one cup of freshly squeezed lime juice, one cup of agave syrup, and two cups of tequila in a pitcher. Stir well and serve over ice – you can garnish with slices of lemon or orange for a touch of elegance.

The Awa Fresca recipe is the perfect drink to enjoy on a hot summer day. This refreshing cocktail is made with melon, lime juice, and a hint of agave syrup. To make it, simply combine one cup of freshly squeezed lime juice, one cup of agave syrup, and two cups of tequila in a pitcher. Stir well and serve over ice – you can garnish with slices of melon for a pop of color.

As we conclude this article, I hope that these Mexican-inspired cocktail recipes have inspired you to get creative behind the bar. With a few simple ingredients and some basic techniques, you can create delicious and refreshing cocktails that are sure to impress your friends. So go ahead – give one of these recipes a try and see what flavors you come up with!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi i'm rick martinez a recipe developer at food network and i am ridiculously passionate about mexican food culture the people and today i'm going to be making you some drinks that i really love some that you'd find in mexico some that are inspired by my travels in mexico we're going to be making agua fresca horchata a lemon lime tequila cooler and a mezcal sour all right so the first drink i'm going to make you is called an agua fresca it's actually probably the original fruit flavored water so when i developed this recipe i wanted to make it as standard as possible for a number of different fruits so these ratios that i'm going to give you are set for a pound of fruit so i'm using cantaloupe today feel free to use strawberries whatever berries you want you can use stone fruit anything that's in season anything that you like to eat will work in this just make sure it's a pound we're going to put our cantaloupe in the blender and i have a cup of cold water this is a quarter cup of sugar i'm going to give a good pinch of salt this is probably about an eighth of a teaspoon if you want to measure it out that's just going to help bring out all of those fruit flavors and i'm going to blend this up start low all right i'm gonna give this a taste i'm gonna put a little bit of lime juice in here i think for this particular cantaloupe i'm only gonna put about a teaspoon in there all right all right great now i've got a pitcher and four cups of cold water so i'm going to pour my cantaloupe into the pitcher and i'm going to add my water i'm going to give it a stir and then i'm going to taste again all right so that is the way that i like it and now i'm going to get the ice got my ice if you were going to serve this immediately friends you could go ahead and drop the ice into the pitcher serve this up for myself i'm just going to put ice in my glass and oh it looks so good look at that color it's so beautiful it's really delicious it's not super sweet i mean definitely if you have a sweet tooth you can add more sugar to it it's just really really refreshing this is exactly what i want to be drinking when i'm having a taco in mexico city or you know having enchiladas at home so the next drink i'm going to make you is called horchata this is basically sweetened rice milk we're also going to flavor it with a little bit of canella or cinnamon and so i have the two cinnamons this is ceylon cinnamon or canela which is common in mexico and then i have what's more common in the united states which is casia i like the flavor of the canelo a lot better it's more mild it's more floral it's a little bit fruity it doesn't have that that harsh spicy edge that cassia cinnamon has for mexican dishes i always try and find the canella so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to grind our rice this is an important step a lot of recipes that i looked at don't have this step in there but i think it's important because we're going to grind this rice into a powder and then let it soak overnight and what that's going to do is it's going to hydrate the the rice and you're going to pull more of the flavor out of the rice than if you just put your whole grain rice in there and i'm going to start this off slow it's going to make a lot of noise we're going to let it grind up until it's a fine powder it's probably going to take about a minute it's going to get really loud all right that looks really good so you're looking for the consistency of a flower so this is basically rice flour so now to this we're going to add some room temperature water so this is five cups of room temperature water i've tried this recipe with boiling water with warm water and some types of rice actually will start to cook if you put boiling water or warm water in them and then what ends up happening is they absorb all the water overnight and you won't have any liquid left to actually strain out and have horchata and i'm going to put one stick of canella in there just give it a whisk make sure that it's all blended and the rice is eventually going to settle back down and that's totally fine but you can see this really beautiful milky color and what's going to happen overnight is you're going to pull out a lot of the flavor in the rice powder and you're going to start to hydrate the rice and it's going to really really delicious all right i'm just gonna cover this tightly and we're gonna let this sit for eight hours and then we're gonna make horchata so i have one that has been soaking for about eight hours you can see the rice has settled to the bottom i'm gonna take the cannella out now i'm gonna just give this a little whisk it'll make it a lot easier to pour into the blender and most likely there will be some bits of rice that are stuck on the bottom and that's fine we'll just scrape those out all right i'm just gonna pour this in so even though the canelo has been infusing overnight with this with the rice mixture i'm going to go ahead and break off a little piece a good two inch piece of canelo is probably all you're going to need so you want to start it slow and then crank it up to high all right so this was about five minutes in the really super powerful blender again definitely you should check and feel how hot it is it should be warm but it shouldn't be like super crazy hot if it gets super crazy hot you will start to cook the rice oh that has a really really good flavor okay so now i'm going to add sugar this is half a cup of granulated sugar and i'm going to add three quarters of a teaspoon of salt all right and so now i'm just going to blend this for about 30 more seconds all i'm trying to do here is just dissolve the sugar and the salt and incorporate it all into the mix i think this is probably ready i'm just going to taste to make sure it's all good and you can see a little steam coming up that's really good so now i'm going to strain this if you don't have cheesecloth don't worry about it you just want to get a really fine mesh strainer to get out any large pieces of rice left in the mixture and if you have a really powerful blender you may not actually have any larger pieces of rice in there it might have pulverized everything pretty fine you just want to keep going back and forth like this the rice is going to collect at the bottom of the cheesecloth so you just need to keep moving it to make sure that there's space for the liquid to pass through it's really thick and creamy so now that everything is strained i'm gonna add some water to it and you can see like how rich and creamy it is and it's still a little warm but i want a cool refreshing horchata so i'm gonna go ahead and add the cold water and just so you know like i mean there are still rice particles in there and they're gonna settle so before you serve you definitely want to just stir it up give it a whisk okay so i have my ice i have my cup i have some ground canela to top it all off with all right all right oh looks so good and just a little pinch of canelo over the top this is really beautiful um it's so good that jasmine rice i love jasmine rice just generally like just steamed jasmine rice but it's like it this is the liquid form it's so delicious and the canela just plays so well with the nuttiness and the spiciness of the rice and it's not very sweet and you know if you're really into uh you know sweet horchata you can definitely add more sugar but to me this is the perfect amount because i'm tasting what i want to taste the rice and the canella so now i'm going gonna make you the fun drinks uh the first drink i'm gonna make is called a mezcal sour so if you are a fan of the whiskey sour you're gonna love this the first thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna make the garnish you don't have to do this but i think it's really fun and it just really elevates this particular drink so what you're going to do is you're going to take a lime and this will also work with a lemon or an orange you want to cut in half and then you just want to cut a really really thin slice very sharp knife will help you out in this situation all right and then take a smaller sharp paring knife and you just want to cut through the little segment and then just run your knife along the edge of the flesh you don't want to cut the peel so just make sure that you're getting as close as you can then just peel it off all right and you can just run the back of your knife down and it will take it right off and then all you have to do is twist and keep twisting and you're just making a little curly cue you have a lime twist all right i'm gonna put that right there all right so the next thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take a strip of peel off both a lime and an orange i find that this motion which is you start at the top and then just kind of move the peeler back and forth it actually picks up less of the bitter white pith than if you just run your peeler all the way down not a big deal but you can see there's just not a lot of the white pith left behind that means you're going to have a less bitter cocktail all right now i'm going to do the same thing with the lime and just gently back and forth you don't have to go crazy okay there we go now put this into my cocktail shaker so you just want to drop those in there and now i'm just going to squeeze some fresh lime juice and if you have a reamer definitely use that use whatever you have and i want one and a half ounces of lime juice which is probably three halves of a lime but i'm gonna squeeze four just in case it smells so good oh i love fresh lime juice i'm gonna measure out one and a half ounces of lime juice and i'm going to measure out one and a half ounces of mezcal and then i'm using agave syrup this is light agave nectar i find that there is a distinct flavor of the agave plant in this syrup that just pulls out the flavor that's in the mezcal and the tequila already so this is half an ounce so i'm going to fill my shaker about halfway with ice now you want to put this on tightly all right all right that is good and you see it's like nice and cold this is called a hawthorne strainer if you don't have one of these you can use a regular kitchen strainer a small strainer and i can actually see little bits of the orange and lime oils floating on top and now the last part of this i'm going to add a couple of bitters just to kind of float on the top and then the last thing i'm going to do is put my twist in all right um wow that was really good the citrus hits you first a little bit of sweetness and then you get the smokiness of the agave and the mezcal if you like whiskey sour you are going to absolutely love the mezcal sour so our final drink is a tequila lime cooler so i'm actually gonna make you a big batch cocktail it's really easy it's basically just a dump and stir all right so in this drink i'm actually combining lemon and lime i really love those flavors it reads really tropical to me it reminds me of being on the beach in the the pacific in mexico so i'm using equal parts lime juice and lemon juice so this is freshly squeezed lime juice and that's one cup and one cup of lemon juice and i'm using agave syrup again i just love the flavor and anytime that i'm making a tequila or a mezcal cocktail i feel like this is a really great addition i'm going to give that a little stir right now just to kind of mix that up all right and now two cups of tequila and you can get your favorite tequila but i really like a silver something that's very light and agave forward and now just pour that directly into the pitcher all right i'm gonna give that another little stir just to mix it all together all right and then what i like to do is just cut a lot of lemon and lime slices and just push them down in there every good cocktail needs some ice all right and then just pour it directly over your ice all right and we're just gonna garnish these guys all right and this is a very simple big batch lemon-lime tequila cooler oh that's so good that is exactly what i want to have at a barbecue or laying on the beach this is so good so easy your friends are going to love it thank you so much for making these mexican inspired drinks with me today we've done four drinks in total we've done the awa fresca with melon we've done the horchata with rice we've done the mezcal sour and we've also done the tequila lime cooler i hope you enjoyed these as much as i do and now i'm gonna have another drink youhi i'm rick martinez a recipe developer at food network and i am ridiculously passionate about mexican food culture the people and today i'm going to be making you some drinks that i really love some that you'd find in mexico some that are inspired by my travels in mexico we're going to be making agua fresca horchata a lemon lime tequila cooler and a mezcal sour all right so the first drink i'm going to make you is called an agua fresca it's actually probably the original fruit flavored water so when i developed this recipe i wanted to make it as standard as possible for a number of different fruits so these ratios that i'm going to give you are set for a pound of fruit so i'm using cantaloupe today feel free to use strawberries whatever berries you want you can use stone fruit anything that's in season anything that you like to eat will work in this just make sure it's a pound we're going to put our cantaloupe in the blender and i have a cup of cold water this is a quarter cup of sugar i'm going to give a good pinch of salt this is probably about an eighth of a teaspoon if you want to measure it out that's just going to help bring out all of those fruit flavors and i'm going to blend this up start low all right i'm gonna give this a taste i'm gonna put a little bit of lime juice in here i think for this particular cantaloupe i'm only gonna put about a teaspoon in there all right all right great now i've got a pitcher and four cups of cold water so i'm going to pour my cantaloupe into the pitcher and i'm going to add my water i'm going to give it a stir and then i'm going to taste again all right so that is the way that i like it and now i'm going to get the ice got my ice if you were going to serve this immediately friends you could go ahead and drop the ice into the pitcher serve this up for myself i'm just going to put ice in my glass and oh it looks so good look at that color it's so beautiful it's really delicious it's not super sweet i mean definitely if you have a sweet tooth you can add more sugar to it it's just really really refreshing this is exactly what i want to be drinking when i'm having a taco in mexico city or you know having enchiladas at home so the next drink i'm going to make you is called horchata this is basically sweetened rice milk we're also going to flavor it with a little bit of canella or cinnamon and so i have the two cinnamons this is ceylon cinnamon or canela which is common in mexico and then i have what's more common in the united states which is casia i like the flavor of the canelo a lot better it's more mild it's more floral it's a little bit fruity it doesn't have that that harsh spicy edge that cassia cinnamon has for mexican dishes i always try and find the canella so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to grind our rice this is an important step a lot of recipes that i looked at don't have this step in there but i think it's important because we're going to grind this rice into a powder and then let it soak overnight and what that's going to do is it's going to hydrate the the rice and you're going to pull more of the flavor out of the rice than if you just put your whole grain rice in there and i'm going to start this off slow it's going to make a lot of noise we're going to let it grind up until it's a fine powder it's probably going to take about a minute it's going to get really loud all right that looks really good so you're looking for the consistency of a flower so this is basically rice flour so now to this we're going to add some room temperature water so this is five cups of room temperature water i've tried this recipe with boiling water with warm water and some types of rice actually will start to cook if you put boiling water or warm water in them and then what ends up happening is they absorb all the water overnight and you won't have any liquid left to actually strain out and have horchata and i'm going to put one stick of canella in there just give it a whisk make sure that it's all blended and the rice is eventually going to settle back down and that's totally fine but you can see this really beautiful milky color and what's going to happen overnight is you're going to pull out a lot of the flavor in the rice powder and you're going to start to hydrate the rice and it's going to really really delicious all right i'm just gonna cover this tightly and we're gonna let this sit for eight hours and then we're gonna make horchata so i have one that has been soaking for about eight hours you can see the rice has settled to the bottom i'm gonna take the cannella out now i'm gonna just give this a little whisk it'll make it a lot easier to pour into the blender and most likely there will be some bits of rice that are stuck on the bottom and that's fine we'll just scrape those out all right i'm just gonna pour this in so even though the canelo has been infusing overnight with this with the rice mixture i'm going to go ahead and break off a little piece a good two inch piece of canelo is probably all you're going to need so you want to start it slow and then crank it up to high all right so this was about five minutes in the really super powerful blender again definitely you should check and feel how hot it is it should be warm but it shouldn't be like super crazy hot if it gets super crazy hot you will start to cook the rice oh that has a really really good flavor okay so now i'm going to add sugar this is half a cup of granulated sugar and i'm going to add three quarters of a teaspoon of salt all right and so now i'm just going to blend this for about 30 more seconds all i'm trying to do here is just dissolve the sugar and the salt and incorporate it all into the mix i think this is probably ready i'm just going to taste to make sure it's all good and you can see a little steam coming up that's really good so now i'm going to strain this if you don't have cheesecloth don't worry about it you just want to get a really fine mesh strainer to get out any large pieces of rice left in the mixture and if you have a really powerful blender you may not actually have any larger pieces of rice in there it might have pulverized everything pretty fine you just want to keep going back and forth like this the rice is going to collect at the bottom of the cheesecloth so you just need to keep moving it to make sure that there's space for the liquid to pass through it's really thick and creamy so now that everything is strained i'm gonna add some water to it and you can see like how rich and creamy it is and it's still a little warm but i want a cool refreshing horchata so i'm gonna go ahead and add the cold water and just so you know like i mean there are still rice particles in there and they're gonna settle so before you serve you definitely want to just stir it up give it a whisk okay so i have my ice i have my cup i have some ground canela to top it all off with all right all right oh looks so good and just a little pinch of canelo over the top this is really beautiful um it's so good that jasmine rice i love jasmine rice just generally like just steamed jasmine rice but it's like it this is the liquid form it's so delicious and the canela just plays so well with the nuttiness and the spiciness of the rice and it's not very sweet and you know if you're really into uh you know sweet horchata you can definitely add more sugar but to me this is the perfect amount because i'm tasting what i want to taste the rice and the canella so now i'm going gonna make you the fun drinks uh the first drink i'm gonna make is called a mezcal sour so if you are a fan of the whiskey sour you're gonna love this the first thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna make the garnish you don't have to do this but i think it's really fun and it just really elevates this particular drink so what you're going to do is you're going to take a lime and this will also work with a lemon or an orange you want to cut in half and then you just want to cut a really really thin slice very sharp knife will help you out in this situation all right and then take a smaller sharp paring knife and you just want to cut through the little segment and then just run your knife along the edge of the flesh you don't want to cut the peel so just make sure that you're getting as close as you can then just peel it off all right and you can just run the back of your knife down and it will take it right off and then all you have to do is twist and keep twisting and you're just making a little curly cue you have a lime twist all right i'm gonna put that right there all right so the next thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take a strip of peel off both a lime and an orange i find that this motion which is you start at the top and then just kind of move the peeler back and forth it actually picks up less of the bitter white pith than if you just run your peeler all the way down not a big deal but you can see there's just not a lot of the white pith left behind that means you're going to have a less bitter cocktail all right now i'm going to do the same thing with the lime and just gently back and forth you don't have to go crazy okay there we go now put this into my cocktail shaker so you just want to drop those in there and now i'm just going to squeeze some fresh lime juice and if you have a reamer definitely use that use whatever you have and i want one and a half ounces of lime juice which is probably three halves of a lime but i'm gonna squeeze four just in case it smells so good oh i love fresh lime juice i'm gonna measure out one and a half ounces of lime juice and i'm going to measure out one and a half ounces of mezcal and then i'm using agave syrup this is light agave nectar i find that there is a distinct flavor of the agave plant in this syrup that just pulls out the flavor that's in the mezcal and the tequila already so this is half an ounce so i'm going to fill my shaker about halfway with ice now you want to put this on tightly all right all right that is good and you see it's like nice and cold this is called a hawthorne strainer if you don't have one of these you can use a regular kitchen strainer a small strainer and i can actually see little bits of the orange and lime oils floating on top and now the last part of this i'm going to add a couple of bitters just to kind of float on the top and then the last thing i'm going to do is put my twist in all right um wow that was really good the citrus hits you first a little bit of sweetness and then you get the smokiness of the agave and the mezcal if you like whiskey sour you are going to absolutely love the mezcal sour so our final drink is a tequila lime cooler so i'm actually gonna make you a big batch cocktail it's really easy it's basically just a dump and stir all right so in this drink i'm actually combining lemon and lime i really love those flavors it reads really tropical to me it reminds me of being on the beach in the the pacific in mexico so i'm using equal parts lime juice and lemon juice so this is freshly squeezed lime juice and that's one cup and one cup of lemon juice and i'm using agave syrup again i just love the flavor and anytime that i'm making a tequila or a mezcal cocktail i feel like this is a really great addition i'm going to give that a little stir right now just to kind of mix that up all right and now two cups of tequila and you can get your favorite tequila but i really like a silver something that's very light and agave forward and now just pour that directly into the pitcher all right i'm gonna give that another little stir just to mix it all together all right and then what i like to do is just cut a lot of lemon and lime slices and just push them down in there every good cocktail needs some ice all right and then just pour it directly over your ice all right and we're just gonna garnish these guys all right and this is a very simple big batch lemon-lime tequila cooler oh that's so good that is exactly what i want to have at a barbecue or laying on the beach this is so good so easy your friends are going to love it thank you so much for making these mexican inspired drinks with me today we've done four drinks in total we've done the awa fresca with melon we've done the horchata with rice we've done the mezcal sour and we've also done the tequila lime cooler i hope you enjoyed these as much as i do and now i'm gonna have another drink you\n"