On a recent trip to Mexico’s tequila territory, my favorite discovery wasn’t the spirit itself, but the tiny glass with the blood-colored liquid served next to it.
Sangrita — literally “little blood” — is served in a glass alongside tequila, its traditional Mexican partner. The basic version is a mix of citrus fruit with spicy chili powder and, sometimes, a shot of tomato juice. From there, the options are endless. Sipped one after the other, tequila and sangrita play off each other, not only keeping the tongue from suffering alcohol overload but also enhancing each others’ flavors and revealing complexities. Despite close to 100 years of civilized enjoyment in Mexico, sangrita is only now coming into the limelight north of the border, thanks in part to bartenders like New York City gun-for-hire Toby Cecchini.
Cecchini is a bartender’s bartender with a big flop of hair, John Lennon specs and a knack for telling peculiar, rambling stories. He wrote the respected bar book “Cosmopolitan," and had a long run at his cult-status Chelsea neighborhood dive bar Passerby, before being forced out by his landlord in 2008.
He makes a mean sangrita, one version of which involves homemade Clamato topped off with onions and peppercorns that are steeped in the drink for hours. He learned his appreciation for the drink at the source.
“I was at a wedding in Mexico with little stations of tequila and sangrita hidden around a garden. When I asked what it was, they said, ‘This is the way we drink tequila here.’
“I got to thinking about it. We’re right next to Mexico and we drink tequila in this B.S. made-up fashion,” he said, alluding to the pervading “lick it, slam it, suck it” approach to tequila in the United States.
“Instead, it should be sip, sip, sip,” he said, moving his head back and forth between two imaginary glasses in his hands.
When he brought sangrita back to Passerby, he quickly found that if one person ordered it, everyone else at the bar did too.
Cecchini divides sangrita in Mexico into two main camps: orange juice with chili, and orange juice, chili and tomato juice blended. He subscribes to the latter’s sweet, savory and spicy triumvirate.
“Otherwise, it’s like a table with two legs,” he said, “but from there, you get into some wild variations.”
Seemingly every bar in Mexico has its own version of sangrita, and each one gives off the feeling that divergence from its recipe would be heretical.
To demonstrate his take on the classic version, Cecchini set up a makeshift bar in his Brooklyn backyard, halving and squeezing five oranges and juicing them in a great, aluminum Ra Chand juicer. (Store-bought OJ is not an option.) Into the juice, he stirred half-teaspoonfuls of ground chipotle, halaby pepper and smoked sweet paprika, allowing for variation depending on how hot the peppers are. He capped it off with a few ounces of tomato juice. If he’s feeling frisky, he sometimes adds salt and pepper, celery salt or Maggi seasoning.
At 2 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, I was confronted with a shot of tequila and a sangrita so fresh, the red and orange colors seem to glow from within. I justified a few sips in the name of research and greater understanding.
I tried Cecchini’s “sip, sip, sip” method, the sangrita’s sweet and spicy flavors both taming the tequila and bringing out its agave and citrus flavors. Returning to the sangrita, the sweet, savory, smoky and spicy flavors took turns on my tongue, back and forth in a ping-pong of happiness. Workday? What workday?
Later, I talked variations on the drink with Josh Harris and Scott Baird, co-founders of the Bon Vivants, a San Francisco-based cocktail and spirits consultancy which just ran four sangrita-making contests in cities across the country. A national winner will be crowned this coming Wednesday at the Tales of the Cocktail boozefest in New Orleans.
The San Francisco winner turned his into a sorbet with what Harris referred to as a “multi-chili component,” and the Los Angeles winner “chased an Indian flavor profile, essentially making his own Madras curry that pulled out the sandalwood notes from an añejo [aged] tequila.”
Mind you, he sounded completely serious when he said this.
“Sangrita is fascinating because it’s bigger than the sum of its parts,” said Harris, “if you put the same tequila with five different sangritas, they would all bring out different aspects of each other.”
Despite this apparent invitation to go exotic, Harris stressed that the competition’s end goal is to get the pairing working, striking a balance between sweet, salty, spicy and tart.
“At its most basic, it’s like tom yum gai,” said Baird, who seemed to be explaining that the route from the Bon Vivants’ California headquarters to Mexico passes through India on the back of a hot and sour Thai chicken. “The sweet and hot give your palate a workout. With the tequila, you’re almost mixing a cocktail in your mouth.”
For a more direct route, I spoke with Dr. Jaime Villalobos, a maestro catador de tequila, or tequila taster, in Guadalajara, who traced sangrita’s origins back to Lake Chapala, which straddles the border between the Mexican states of Jalisco and Michoacán. There, in the early 1900s, the spicy and refreshing juice leftover from the pico de gallo fruit salad was consumed as a tiny drink. (At this point, Villalobos paused to sing a few lines of a deceptively sweet song, Mike Laure’s “Tiburon a la Vista.”)
“Now, every bartender does it his own way,” he said, “and everybody thinks they make the definitive edition.”
Perhaps because of this, Villalobos is surprisingly open to new ideas when it comes to sangrita, admitting he once particularly enjoyed a version made with a rather nontraditional passion fruit.
“At its base, a good sangrita should have citrus, a bit of sweet and some spice,” he said, but like any good Mexican bartender he also has a personal definitive version, which requires a bit of kick.
“The objective is that it’s spicy,” he said. “If it’s not spicy, it’s not sangrita.”
Sangrita — literally “little blood” — is served in a glass alongside tequila, its traditional Mexican partner. The basic version is a mix of citrus fruit with spicy chili powder and, sometimes, a shot of tomato juice. From there, the options are endless. Sipped one after the other, tequila and sangrita play off each other, not only keeping the tongue from suffering alcohol overload but also enhancing each others’ flavors and revealing complexities. Despite close to 100 years of civilized enjoyment in Mexico, sangrita is only now coming into the limelight north of the border, thanks in part to bartenders like New York City gun-for-hire Toby Cecchini.
Cecchini is a bartender’s bartender with a big flop of hair, John Lennon specs and a knack for telling peculiar, rambling stories. He wrote the respected bar book “Cosmopolitan," and had a long run at his cult-status Chelsea neighborhood dive bar Passerby, before being forced out by his landlord in 2008.
He makes a mean sangrita, one version of which involves homemade Clamato topped off with onions and peppercorns that are steeped in the drink for hours. He learned his appreciation for the drink at the source.
“I was at a wedding in Mexico with little stations of tequila and sangrita hidden around a garden. When I asked what it was, they said, ‘This is the way we drink tequila here.’
“I got to thinking about it. We’re right next to Mexico and we drink tequila in this B.S. made-up fashion,” he said, alluding to the pervading “lick it, slam it, suck it” approach to tequila in the United States.
“Instead, it should be sip, sip, sip,” he said, moving his head back and forth between two imaginary glasses in his hands.
When he brought sangrita back to Passerby, he quickly found that if one person ordered it, everyone else at the bar did too.
Cecchini divides sangrita in Mexico into two main camps: orange juice with chili, and orange juice, chili and tomato juice blended. He subscribes to the latter’s sweet, savory and spicy triumvirate.
“Otherwise, it’s like a table with two legs,” he said, “but from there, you get into some wild variations.”
Seemingly every bar in Mexico has its own version of sangrita, and each one gives off the feeling that divergence from its recipe would be heretical.
To demonstrate his take on the classic version, Cecchini set up a makeshift bar in his Brooklyn backyard, halving and squeezing five oranges and juicing them in a great, aluminum Ra Chand juicer. (Store-bought OJ is not an option.) Into the juice, he stirred half-teaspoonfuls of ground chipotle, halaby pepper and smoked sweet paprika, allowing for variation depending on how hot the peppers are. He capped it off with a few ounces of tomato juice. If he’s feeling frisky, he sometimes adds salt and pepper, celery salt or Maggi seasoning.
At 2 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, I was confronted with a shot of tequila and a sangrita so fresh, the red and orange colors seem to glow from within. I justified a few sips in the name of research and greater understanding.
I tried Cecchini’s “sip, sip, sip” method, the sangrita’s sweet and spicy flavors both taming the tequila and bringing out its agave and citrus flavors. Returning to the sangrita, the sweet, savory, smoky and spicy flavors took turns on my tongue, back and forth in a ping-pong of happiness. Workday? What workday?
Later, I talked variations on the drink with Josh Harris and Scott Baird, co-founders of the Bon Vivants, a San Francisco-based cocktail and spirits consultancy which just ran four sangrita-making contests in cities across the country. A national winner will be crowned this coming Wednesday at the Tales of the Cocktail boozefest in New Orleans.
The San Francisco winner turned his into a sorbet with what Harris referred to as a “multi-chili component,” and the Los Angeles winner “chased an Indian flavor profile, essentially making his own Madras curry that pulled out the sandalwood notes from an añejo [aged] tequila.”
Mind you, he sounded completely serious when he said this.
“Sangrita is fascinating because it’s bigger than the sum of its parts,” said Harris, “if you put the same tequila with five different sangritas, they would all bring out different aspects of each other.”
Despite this apparent invitation to go exotic, Harris stressed that the competition’s end goal is to get the pairing working, striking a balance between sweet, salty, spicy and tart.
“At its most basic, it’s like tom yum gai,” said Baird, who seemed to be explaining that the route from the Bon Vivants’ California headquarters to Mexico passes through India on the back of a hot and sour Thai chicken. “The sweet and hot give your palate a workout. With the tequila, you’re almost mixing a cocktail in your mouth.”
For a more direct route, I spoke with Dr. Jaime Villalobos, a maestro catador de tequila, or tequila taster, in Guadalajara, who traced sangrita’s origins back to Lake Chapala, which straddles the border between the Mexican states of Jalisco and Michoacán. There, in the early 1900s, the spicy and refreshing juice leftover from the pico de gallo fruit salad was consumed as a tiny drink. (At this point, Villalobos paused to sing a few lines of a deceptively sweet song, Mike Laure’s “Tiburon a la Vista.”)
“Now, every bartender does it his own way,” he said, “and everybody thinks they make the definitive edition.”
Perhaps because of this, Villalobos is surprisingly open to new ideas when it comes to sangrita, admitting he once particularly enjoyed a version made with a rather nontraditional passion fruit.
“At its base, a good sangrita should have citrus, a bit of sweet and some spice,” he said, but like any good Mexican bartender he also has a personal definitive version, which requires a bit of kick.
“The objective is that it’s spicy,” he said. “If it’s not spicy, it’s not sangrita.”
