Mixing Masterful Mojitos
The three “M’s” of a delectable coping cocktail
To help cope with stresses of life and brought about by current events, we propose the three “M’s” of a delectable coping cocktail: Mixing Masterful Mojitos! As featured in a previous podcast, our “delectable distraction this week is a perfect way to escape to relaxing warm spring days and also a great addition to our growing list of coping cocktails – a masterful Mojito.
The Mojito hails from Cuba and consists of five key ingredients: rum, the juice of two fresh limes, sugar, mint leaves and soda water. We take the essence of this delicious recipe and give it a Pure Life twist! So let’s get into it and start making our own Masterful Mojito.
To start with, we’ll need to dust off one of our favorite bar tending tools- the muddler. As discussed in a previous blog post, the muddler is an essential part of any bar tending tool kit. It helps smash and mix various ingredients together for the perfect mix.
For our Mojito, we will be using the muddler, drink stirer, mixing glass, shaker, a jigger, citrus press and bar knife. We’ll also be using the following ingredients: fresh limes, simple syrup (basically sugar water), club soda, mint leaves and rum. The classic Mojito calls for light rum as it tends to deliver a sweater and more subtle base. However we like to go bold over here. Thus we’ll be making our Mojito with dark rum, and our go-to dark rum is Ole Nassau straight from the Bahamas. Now that we’ve assembled all the ingredients, it’s time to put them all together.
To start with, fill a high-ball glass with ice. Next cut one lime in quarters and the other lime in halves. Add two quarters of lime into a mixing glass. Collect five (5) mint leaves and gently muddle them in your hands. Next place them in the mixing glass with the lime wedges. Now, using the citrus press, add the juice of a full lime to the mixing glass. Here we need to add our simple syrup to the mix of lime juice, lime wedges and mint leaves. Add 1/2 jigger (roughly 1 fl oz) of simple syrup to the mixing glass (adjust this amount per your tastes).
It’s time to use the muddler to smash the lime wedges, mint leaves, lime juice and simple syrup all together. Once muddled, we’re ready to add it to our high-ball glass of ice. Add one full jigger (2 fl oz) of rum to the glass of ice and the muddled mix of lime juice, lime wedges, simple syrup and mint leaves. Finally top off the drink with soda water and give the drink a stir.
Stirring the drink not only mixes the rum with the muddled lime juice, simple syrup and mint leaves but also helps bring the mint leaves off the bottom for a beautiful presentation. Garnish with a slice of lime and enjoy your home made masterful Mojito! It’s also easy to make a pitcher for larger gatherings (once social distancing is lifted of course). Simply repeat the steps above by how ever many glasses your pitcher can hold and be sure to include lots of mint. Cheers!
