There’s something about mojitos that reminds us of beaches and sunshine (and that time we had one too many....). Here to teach us how to make them perfectly is Gavin MacMillan, master mixologist at Bartender One.
You make a mean mojito. Can you tell us how we can do it at home?
Yes. One of the first concepts we need to talk about is balancing flavour. Any good cocktail has 4 main elements; a sweet element, a sour element, a strong element and something to kind of mitigate that strength. So the strong element of a mojito is obviously alcohol. The element that is going to stretch out the rum so we aren’t getting the full strength of it is soda (ice helps too). The sweet is represented by the sugar and the sour by the lemon or lime.
Let’s Begin.
Take a small handful of limes (about 4 or 5 wedges). Take your tall glass and put them straight into the bottom. That’s your sour element of this cocktail. Now, grab a spoon and some refined sugar. The classic cocktail is done with white sugar, but when you are making your own you can use brown sugar. Put in 2 teaspoons of sugar. Now we’ve got the beginnings of what we call the balance between sweet and sour.
To introduce these two flavours and to help them get to know each other, we are going to use a bartender’s tool called a muddler. The muddler is a bartender’s version of a pharmacist mortar and pestle nurse. Take the muddler and use it to mash up the ingredients; really introduce the sugar and the lime and get them talking to each other. With the glass on a hard surface, the muddler goes straight inside and we are just going to push and quarter turn. What you’re trying to do is extract some of the juice from the limes. So you should have a good looking paste in the bottom of your glass now.
The next unique ingredient to the mojito is mint. Mint comes in a variety of flavours, shapes and sizes (I prefer spearmint). What I’m going to do is use a few pieces of mint, but just the leaves. You don’t want the stems of the mint in there; you want 8-10 good-sized mint leaves. Now go back and do a second muddle. You don’t want to muddle with the mint in there the first time, because you really want to focus on combining the lime and the sugar. This time all you’re really going to do is release the aromatics that are in the mint. So just gently muddle this time.
Now add some ice to the mix, and then add the rum (an ounce/ounce and a quarter) directly into the glass (count to 4). Now, give it a bit of a churn with a bar spoon and then top the glass right up with ice. Add some soda (we try to do a 2 count for this).
This isn’t quite a servable drink, and the reason is the yummies. The yummies are all at the bottom of the drink, and you want to introduce those to the rest of the drink. Go back with your bar spoon and give it a churn. You want everything to be distributed evenly. Take a lime wheel, set that on the edge of the glass. Grab a mint leaf, bend it in half rub it along the rim of the glass to flavour it. And last but not least, grab some mint for garnish.
One of the things that needs to happen with mint, before it goes into a drink, and one of the things that makes the mojito a unique beverage is that it’s got an aromatic quality to it. It’s not just a taste. Mint needs to be woken up and you can do that by just hitting it against your palm. What you’re doing is breaking up some of the cell membranes in the mint, and you can really smell it. It really makes a big difference in flavouring the mojito.
And that, is your classic Mojito.
Gavin has worked all over the world from London to Singapore, with hundreds of restaurant and bar concepts. He has been featured in music videos, on the Travel Channel, A&E, City TV's Breakfast Television, E! Entertainment Television, The Toronto Sun, Metro News, Bar and Beverage, and many more. He is one of the founding members of BartenderOne.
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