A Pair of Easy-to-Batch Frozen Margaritas

Sherry. Cointreau. Salt. Ice. Satisfaction.

It’s easy to look down on frozen blended cocktails. They can come across as dull, too sweet, sloppy, and, to the uninformed, basic. They are often sold based more on their rainbow colors than their construction or ingredients. Even if they are somehow based on classics or quasi-classics, they are almost certainly modern creations: It’s not like pre-Prohibition bartenders had blenders. 

Even in the bad old days of drinking, they were seen as somehow lesser. Two decades ago, when I worked as a server at a Florida seafood restaurant and bar, the bartenders would constantly sneer at the frozen concoctions, especially the frozen Margarita. I have a distinct memory of one barkeep telling me that no one who knew anything about bartending should ever bother with a frozen Margarita, because the frozen version contained more water and thus was lower proof. The point of drinking, in this telling, was to consume more booze, not less, independent of quality. Like I said, these were the bad old days. 

Now, it’s true that frozen drinks are blended with large amounts of ice. Instead of shaking the drink over ice to chill and dilute it, the blender does the work for you. And that means that the final drink has a larger volume of ice/water than you might typically have in a cocktail. But if anything, this is a reason to gravitate toward frozen drinks, which are best enjoyed on punishingly hot summer days, and which sometimes — often — demand a second serving. 

A related benefit of frozen drinks, meanwhile, is that preparing several at a time is relatively easy: Frozen blended drinks make great batches for small to medium size groups of friends. 

As for whether frozen drinks are sloppy and basic…well, that’s only true if you make them that way.

A well-made frozen drink — precisely measured, with quality ingredients — is just as much of a pleasure as any other properly produced cocktail. The trick is to understand the underlying structural changes that are necessitated by blending a drink with large amounts of ice.  

So today, we’re going to look at a pair of frozen, blended Margaritas, one cleverly designed with medium dry sherry and aged tequila, the other using a similar structure and ingredients you will already have if you made last week’s conventional Margarita. 

Sherry 2000

I’ll admit: For a long time, I myself was something of a frozen drink skeptic. It wasn’t that I’d never had a good one, and certainly the tiki tradition contains any number of excellent flash-blended drinks. But in my experience, good frozen drinks were rare, and I didn’t spend much time working on them myself.