Blended and Shaved Ice Drinks: Rebalancing a Recipe for the Blender

Why blended drinks need their own recipes

Dave Arnold admits that a proper margarita is a shaken drink served up in a coupe, but he enjoys a blender margarita too, and says there is a trick to doing it well. A blender full of ice chills and dilutes faster than almost any other tool: the blades break the ice into very fine pieces with huge surface area, and they move the cocktail across it at speed. He does not use blenders at the bar because they are loud; he uses an ice shaver, which also makes very fine ice but does not agitate the drink. With a little stirring, shaved-ice drinks end up almost identical to blended ones in dilution and chilling. A cheap blender tends to leave chunks of ice, while a shaver gives even pieces, and recipes can be swapped between the two. For a home bar, a blender is fine.

A normal shaken recipe cannot go straight into a blender: it comes out overtart, undersweet and overdiluted. You can rebalance with more sugar and less acid, but dilution is harder, because most shaken recipes simply hold too much liquid. The fix is to reduce the liquid.

The shaken margarita, and what a blender does to it

The shaken margarita is 2 ounces of 40 percent tequila, three-quarters of an ounce of Cointreau, three-quarters of an ounce of strained lime juice, a quarter ounce of simple syrup and five drops of saline or a generous pinch of salt. The liquid is 3.75 ounces; shaking picks up about 2 ounces of water, for a drink of just under 6 ounces at roughly 19 percent alcohol. Blended with about 5 ounces of ice, the same drink would take up closer to 3 ounces of water, which is too much.

The blender itself

Even without liquor, spinning blades melt ice by friction; Arnold even uses his blender as a heater when clarifying juices. How much melts depends on the power of the blender and the volume you load. For a Vita-Prep on full power, a 180-gram load of ice and cocktail melts 0.0007 grams of ice per second per gram of load, giving only 1.9 ml of extra dilution after 15 seconds. A 500-gram load melts 0.029, about four times as much, which is almost 8 ml extra per cocktail; at a full litre it falls to 0.0016, or 4.3 ml per cocktail. The lesson is not to blend too long, only long enough for a good texture.

Using an ice shaver

Any shaver that makes good shaved ice works, even a children’s snow-cone machine; Arnold prefers machines that shave a large block, which give consistent ice and are easy to use. At the bar he shaves to order into 5-ounce coupes. To get the dilution right every time:

• Divide the drink into two roughly equal volumes and pour half into the coupe. Some ice has to melt as it falls into the booze for the presentation to work, and a dry coupe could not hold enough shaved ice.
• Shave ice into the coupe until a dome rises over the rim, about 70 grams.
• Put the coupe in front of the guest and pour the other half over the ice. It should melt almost instantly and the level should reach nearly the rim.
• Give a gentle stir with a bar spoon to finish chilling and mix. A little ice remains, but most has melted.

The blender margarita

His Blender Marg uses 1 ounce of Cointreau, three-quarters of an ounce of La Puritita mezcal (a robust blanco, because so little is used), half an ounce of Yellow Chartreuse, half an ounce of strained lime juice, 10 drops of Hellfire bitters or another spicy, non-acidic ingredient, five drops of saline or a pinch of salt, and about 4 ounces (120 grams) of ice. Blend only until the ice is crushed. Some ice should remain; if none does, you blended too long and friction over-diluted the drink.

The recipe has 2.75 ounces of liquid instead of 3.75 and picks up about 2.5 ounces of water, for a drink of about 17.2 percent alcohol. It works because Cointreau and Yellow Chartreuse are high in both alcohol and sugar: 2.25 ounces of 40 percent booze and about 12.75 grams of sugar, roughly 0.7 ounce of simple syrup, fit into only 2.75 ounces of liquid.

A generic blender sour

That recipe generalises if you keep the ratio of alcohol, sugar and acid roughly fixed. The generic blender sour is about 2.25 ounces of liquid containing around 0.9 ounce (27 ml) of pure ethanol and 12.75 grams of sugar, half an ounce of fresh sour juice, about 4 ounces of ice and a pinch of salt. Spirits at 80 proof have the alcohol but no sugar, and simple syrup would add liquid, so use high-alcohol liqueurs as in the margarita, very high-proof spirits, or sugared booze.

To make sugared booze, dissolve 212 grams of superfine sugar in a litre of 80 or 100 proof spirit in a covered container, with gentle heat if you like; do not boil, or the bottle may burst. With 100-proof spirits use 2 ounces per drink, plus perhaps a bar spoon of syrup and a quarter ounce of juice or water; with 80-proof use 2.25 ounces of the sugared booze. Two examples: the Rittenhouse Blender Sour is 2 ounces of sugared Rittenhouse rye (44 percent), half an ounce of lemon juice, a quarter ounce of orange juice, four drops of saline and 4 ounces of ice, finishing at 16.7 percent. The Blender Daiquiri is 2.25 ounces of sugared Flor de Cana white rum (35 percent), half an ounce of lime juice, saline and 4 ounces of ice, finishing at 15 percent.