I recently got a vitamix. The included recipe book has a few cocktails, but they all taste pretty watered down. Are there any general rules of thumb for ratios when it comes to making frozen cocktails in a blender? Is it possible to get the boozyness of a commercial slushy machine, or with a blender do you need a lot more ice to get the consistency right? I am thinking of trying to do some frozen takes on classics and unsure about things like ratios of ice to spirit. Or if a recipe calls for citrus juice should I just throw a whole peeled lime in there and blend it to a pulp? I have aspirations to make an abomination of a Last Word smoothie, but don’t want to risk my precious supply of chartreuse on experimentation (or any spirit really since there’s minimum volumes required to get it to blend). Thanks for the advice.
As so often, Jeffrey Morgenthaler has some answers. Here‘s his recipe for a blended Negroni, a blended Pina Colada and an article about his technique when making blended cocktails. Hope that helps. Cheers!
Freeze lime & lemon juice, put your drink mix in the freezer so it’s super cold when you blend, and there is a post on here about using tonic syrup instead of tonic water, look for ways like that to make the flavor more concentrated.
But also yes - different drinks are more amenable to being slushies. Things like a last word don’t have enough dilution to have a bunch of ice blended into them. Margaritas and Daiquiris do taste good frozen.
I think of it more like boozing up a frozen lemonade or whatever, and less like freezing up a stiff drink.
Thanks. There were a few bars I remember doing things like frozen negronis or frozen gimlets, which I prefer to super sweet slushies. So trying to figure out how to do things more in that direction.