We brought some smoked salts back from a trip to Napa Valley a couple of years ago – an ivory-coloured salt smoked with barrels used for aging Chardonnay, and a dark brown salt smoked with Washington alder wood.
The brown salt smells distinctly like a campfire, and is incredibly mouth-watering, like those sour candies rolled in citric acid. This tangy/juicy quality gave me the idea of salted mango, which tasted practically electric. Even now, the idea of these dark crystals on glistening mango flesh is making me drool.
The salts inspired a whole year of smokiness: smoked paprika spice rubs, chipotle bloody Caesars, double-smoked bacon in mushroom risotto, and smoked sweet potato gratin. Like most strong-tasting things, smoke seemed most successful when blended into a complex harmony of flavours – not as a single note. Still, I wondered how the flavour could be featured in a way that was interesting without seeming like a cheap thrill, like the salted mango.
Some time later, in Mexico, I tasted mescal for the first time, which is a smoked spirit made from the agave cactus, like tequila. After several glasses, the idea of a smoked Margarita began to waft around. We tried making one when we got back home – absolutely delicious, I think especially because we used a reposado, a gorgeously honey-hued tequila that’s aged in oak casks for several months.
After a couple of southwestern-themed dinner parties, the reposado ran out, and we started using ordinary silver tequila to make smoked Margaritas. These were completely unsexy, kind of unidimensional, lacking the intrigue that marks a truly great cocktail. There’s a unique vegetal flavour to silver tequila, an eerie volatile quality that makes me think of the luminous peacock colours of gasoline on wet pavement. A pewtery purple note. Something volatile and medicinal. Lavender. Sparkling like an amethyst in a bed of frosted smoke. That’s what this drink tastes like to me.
Smoked Lavender Margaritas
Ice
4 ounces of silver tequila
1 ounce Cointreau (or another bitter orange liqueur)
The juice of two limes
2 pinches of smoked salt
2 ounces of lavender syrup
To make the lavender syrup, boil a cup of water with a cup of sugar, 3 tablespoons of lavender flowers, and a strip of lemon peel. (The acid in the lemon peel helps preserve the colour of the flowers). Reduce to low heat and simmer for twenty minutes. Taste the syrup, you may want to add more flowers and simmer longer. Strain the flowers out.
To make the Margaritas, nearly fill the pitcher of a blender with ice, add all of the other ingredients, and blend until smooth. Taste for salt, lavender and lime, adding more if necessary to balance the flavours. Pour into chilled glasses rimmed with smoked salt.
great tips. I enjoyed reading this
This looks amazing- I particularly love the idea of smoked salt to go with lavender’s transient flavors. Seems like it would cement it down long enough to enjoy it.