Celery is not one of the first flavors to come to mind when thinking about cocktails, but it is one of the more delicious combinations I’ve had in awhile. After I ate a confusingly delicious celery sorbet at my favorite local ice cream shop, I was inspired to work celery into a refreshing frozen cocktail. After a lot of tasting, the most consistently delicious pairing for the crisp and earthy flavors of celery was to be found with raicilla, the regional mezcal from Jalisco. The piquant, herbal, and earthy notes of raicilla worked with my experimental celery-based recipe almost every time, outshining other regional agave spirit categories, such as bacanora. While this raicilla cocktail is a little off the wall, it’s surprisingly easy to drink, and incredibly refreshing, especially on humid summer days.
Finding the best raicilla for your summer slushy
There are not a lot of good raicillas available in the US market, either for sipping and mixing. My standard cocktail raicilla is Estancia at 45% ABV, with piquant and lactic flavors that combine earthiness and fruitiness for a well-rounded profile. It’s tasty enough to sip on its own, and friendly enough to work well in a lot of mixed drinks. This recipe highlights the earthy and herbal notes, while the fruitiness and spiciness keep it fresh and lively without skewing too vegetal with the potent celery flavor.
Celery is crisp and vegetal-forward,which creates a nice counterpoint to sweet and tart flavors. In a similar vein as the trend (from a few years ago) of combining green juice with a margarita for a semi-healthy and 100% delicious treat, this frozen celery cooler is all about tempering the sweetness to highlight other flavors for maximum refreshment factor. Could you add in other flavors like basil or hot chilies? Absolutely. Does it need it? I don’t think so. There’s something about keeping this simple that highlights the ingredients in a way that risks getting muddled when adding other flavors. The combination of tart, bright, slightly spicy raicilla with the cool, saline, crisp celery just hits. A little sweetness and lime is all that’s needed to coax out the charm from the distinctive flavors in both the raicilla and the celery.
Frozen Celery Raicilla Cooler (2 servings)
Ingredients
- 6 ounces fresh pressed celery juice (use a juicer, or if you don’t have a juicer you can blend celery and squeeze the juice from the fibers)
- 4 ounces Estancia raicilla
- 2 ounces fresh squeezed lime juice
- 2 ounces (or to taste) simple syrup
- Ice, about 1.5 cups
- Seasoned salt for the rim
Method for making this raicilla cocktail:
Chill and rim your glasses, set aside.
Mix ingredients in a blender and add an equal amount of ice by volume; the ice and liquid should be level in the blender. Blend into a slushy consistency, sample and adjust simple syrup to taste.
Pour into chilled and rimmed glasses, garnish with a leafy celery stalk.
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