Margaritas and Singstar

I had a few people over to my place last night for Margaritas and Singstar. The aim of the evening was to find the best Margarita recipe. The three basic Margarita ingredients are tequila, triple sec and lime juice.

We used a blanco tequila - Pepe Lopez silver. You can also use a reposado for a bit more of an oaky taste but I find the blanco better. The more aged (anejo) tequilas aren't as good for margaritas.

Triple sec is an orange liqueur. We used Cointreau which is a much better orange liqueur but has twice the alcohol content.

Margaritas are best with fresh lemon/lime juice. Apparently lime juice is the best, but limes are very small and expensive so we used half lemon juice and half lime juice which worked just as well. We used 1kg of limes and 1.5kg of lemons.

Most people find Margaritas made with just lemon/lime juice and the alcohol to be far too tart, so it is common to use sweet and sour mix instead of the lime juice. We made ourselves some sugar syrup that was more than 66% sugar and mixed it roughly 50/50 with the lemon & lime juice to get the right balance of sweet and sour.

Salting the rim of the glass is also important, since the salt enhances the taste of the margarita.

How you combine the tequila, triple sec and sour mix to make the margarita turns out to be the area of most variance. I prefer 2:1:1, shaken on the rocks. The others (based on what they had in Texas) prefer 1 part tequila, 1 part cointreau and 2 parts sour mix, for a 1:1:2 ratio served with crushed ice. Although I didn't try it last night, I think I'd also quite like a 3:2:1 ratio on the rocks.

The majority conclusion was that 1:1:2 Margaritas are yummy, country music is great, and singing is more fun when everyone is a bit tipsy.