Latest / Into The Barchive / The Paloma — Mexico’s Favorite Tequila Cocktail
Transcript
- ITB: Welcome Barkivist to this week's episode of Into the Barkive, where we're going into the Paloma. Yeah, when people think about tequila cocktails, most Americans jump straight to... Margarita! But in Mexico, the drink most people actually reach for is the Paloma. The Paloma! The Paloma is a simpler, more refreshing, lower ABV. Yeah, and it's ubiquitous. It's everywhere across Mexico. And unlike the Margarita, the Paloma is not tied to some sort of glamorous or... hotly contested origin story and it wasn't developed by a famous bartender. In fact, it's a highball drink that emerged from everyday drinking culture. Speaking of drinking, I say let's get to mixing. Let's do it. For our first cocktail today, we're gonna make the classic Paloma. Now, for in Mexico, a lot of people, Paloma is just really tequila and grapefruit soda. That's it, it's a simple pour. So what we're gonna do is in a high ball glass, we're gonna add ice to begin with. so we can start getting some things chilled down. And to our iced highball glass, we're gonna add two ounces of Blanco Tequila. As our base spirit, again, make sure you're using 100 % agave tequila. So add that over our ice. The next thing we're gonna add is a half ounce of lime juice, just to give it a little acidic top and brightness. The grapefruit adds maybe some bitterness but doesn't necessarily have the acid. So we'll add that lime, fresh lime juice in there. Now for grapefruit juice, a lot of people made today in craft cocktail bars turn to something like a fever tree pink grapefruit soda. And this is an excellent choice. But today, since we're talking about the paloma in the context of Mexican everyday drinking culture, we're going to go like they would a bottle of squirt. Now, when you go buy your bottle of squirt, go to a Mexican market. It's like the Mexican Coke, right? If you buy a two liter of squirt at your normal grocery store, it's going to have high fructose corn syrup, all that sort of thing. Get it in a glass bottle where it's made with cane sugar. So I'm going to pop open my squirt. I'm going to add some of my squirt grapefruit soda to the cocktail. And then just to give it that little extra pop, we're going to add a couple drops of saline solution. along the way and for the garnish. Because while that fever tree pink grapefruit soda would have like that pink grapefruit color, the squirt doesn't quite have that color profile. So to know like, hey, I'm drinking something with grapefruit here. What I like to do is add a nice slice of grapefruit into my cocktail as so. And then add that straw again right by the grapefruit and kind of push down the ice a little to make sure the tequila, the squirt, the saline, the lime juice are all combined. And now we have our classic Paloma. Cheers. For our second Paloma, we have the fresh juice Paloma. It's like, think if the classic cocktail world were to ask, what if we treated the Paloma like we did the margarita? So we're gonna use those specs. and our shaking tin. We're gonna do two ounces of 100 % blue agave tequila. One full ounce of grapefruit juice. Yes, yes, yes. We've talked about fresh is best, but if you're also going to use pre-squeeze, make sure you get ⁓ non-sugar added. Organic. Juices. So you're not using any additional sweetener that you're having to adjust or reduce from that you can control it as you're making your own cocktail. Again, two ounces. Now one ounce of the juice. We're gonna do three quarters of an ounce of that fresh lime juice. Unlike the margarita, we are going to use simple syrup. We're to go three quarters of an ounce ⁓ of a simple syrup. This is a one to one sugar to water ratio. And then lastly, because we are not going to do a salt rim or anything like a margarita, I'm going to go back to that saline solution that I used in the last episode just to make it pop, to add a little bit of flavor. Let's do about four drops. One of those was probably a half dash more than a drop, but we will be okay there. Let's ice our tin and shake. Now that we've shaken, we've got a nice frost built up around our tin. We've got enough shaking and dilution and aeration done. Let's put some fresh ice into our glass. And now we strain. Now remember we talked about that Paloma being kind of that lower ABV. where in Blake's first cocktail, he used a grapefruit soda. We basically just made the grapefruit soda when we had grapefruit juice, adding some syrup to it and now soda water. for garnish the same. Let's go with a half moon of our grapefruit and let's go with a straw. And now we have the fresh juice, Paloma. Cheers. Now that we've built the cocktails, let's build the context. The origins of the Paloma. Well, unlike the Margarita, the Paloma has very little documentation in terms of an origin story, but it appears to have emerged like in mid 20th century Mexico. OK, little documentation to begin with. That's not unusual. Again, we've talked about stories with the Margarita. was hearsay hearsay. after a girlfriend, after a bunch of Americans came in for prohibition, so, not too unfamiliar for an agave spirit. Yeah, I mean, the Paloma is often attributed to Don Javier Delgado Corona, a bar owner in the city of Tequila in the state of Jalisco. And while Don Javier was known for his hospitality, He personally never made a strong claim about inventing the drink and you know, the Paloma probably long existed before it got associated with his bar. So it was probably, you know, a grandma, grandpa made this as being hospitable and it was just passed down family to family. And so somebody took note that he did this for them and that's where potentially it came about. Potentially. mean, that's the thing. High balls like this typically arise organically rather than someone thinking, ⁓ how am I going to do this? I mean, it's just someone takes their locally available spirit with a locally available soda and adds little this little that and boom, you're done. Okay. So let's talk about that then because it's a lower ABV sessionable drink. It's the spirit and a soda. So where did the soda come into play here? Like grapefruit soda? Well, and I mean, that's why we can guess that this cocktail originated in mid 20th century Mexico, because grapefruit soda became widely available in Mexico in the 1930s through about the 1950s. The big one, of course, is squirt. Yes. You use the bottle here. Yeah. Yeah. So, squirt was invented in Arizona in 1938, and it became extremely popular in Mexico. In fact, in 1950, a brochure for squirt suggested mixing it with tequila. And then later in 1955, squirt was launched in Mexico, and by the mid-70s, the Palomas popularity was widespread throughout Mexico. Mmm. Okay. So... This kind of has that origin story of a lot of cocktails. The introduction to something made the spirit more available somewhere else. Jen and Tonic is where I'm going, right? Like Tonic was finally invented Jen to help the, you know, get that bitter flavor ish. So now spurts there and it's like, how do I get a booze your version of this beverage that I'm going to drink? Absolutely. And the long times whether comes from the spirit side or the soda side. These are simple serves that you can make at home, right? You don't have to go to a craft cocktail bar to mix tequila and squirt. Nope, not at all. And so this drink has become more popular in the United States, even though the margarita is still king. Yep. With the Mexican-American diaspora, as more people from Mexico have moved into the United States. They brought the Paloma with them. Yeah, I mean, we see the Paloma now on on menus that we would not have in the past. Most Mexican restaurants we were talking about in the previous episode, the margarita and then like you get the strawberry one, the mango one, the pine nut, like all these different flavors. But now they also have the Paloma is intentionally listed on the menu as well. It's not like a secondary, you know, an afterthought. It's it's being promoted as one of their higher end, better quality cocktails. Yeah. And in the cocktail Renaissance, even outside of like Mexican restaurants and agave theme bars, many bartenders have replaced the grapefruit soda with like what you did in your drink, a mixture of grapefruit juice, sugar, and sparkling water. When we get to talking about our specific breakdowns, guess, of our cocktails, Let's do that real quick then. Yeah, what before we dive deeper? So the classic right when going into this episode it was I was like hey I'm gonna do the I'm gonna do the soda like let's let's go into this and you challenged me to go hey let's think outside of the box like What if you didn't have access to? The the squirt or the fever tree right that we would simply just go to I mean one when we make it at the house Not often are we adding the fresh lime juice, maybe because we don't have fresh limes available. And so we're just an easy night. It's a one pour, one pour, and we're done. So you adding the extra citrus to make it pop, I mean, yes, we would prefer to do that, but we don't always have the fresh citrus available. And then also, again, saline, like different things that you can take the most basic. by doing ever so slightly more. We're not even talking about you didn't have to bring out a shaker. didn't have to do everything was still building last, but it can elevate a cocktail more. So seeing that happen. And as I think I use them as my intro into making the cocktail, like truly treating the Paloma as a margarita and like with that reverence, if you will. I would, I mean, that is completely different than that. There's a time and space for this version. That's an elevated version. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about it, while purists still might prefer just a simple tequila, lime juice, grapefruit soda, if you're working in a cocktail bar, particularly one that is not like agave based or something like that, as long as you have grapefruit juice, You don't have to worry about ordering or storing grapefruit soda, right? Because pretty much any classic cocktail bar is going to have tequila, lime juice, simple syrup, soda, club soda, grapefruit soda. And most cocktail barters would have grapefruit juice as well. So again, Like from an ordering and storage perspective, so all logistics here instead of, okay, now I've got to find a place to store this aside, beside my tonic water or my ginger beer. You can make a Paloma and even if you don't put it on the menu, if someone called, Hey, can I just have a Paloma? You're like, Hey, I don't have grapefruit soda, but I can make you a fresh fruit, fresh juice version. And it's a fantastic cocktail. mean, truly. breaking this one down and we may need to take this to a separate episode, but reconstructing these and like having fruit soda at a bar is as simple as what we just did there. Yeah. I mean, there are some places that do it in a similar fashion for like ginger beer based cocktails where you do like the ginger syrup and soda water instead of ginger beer. Gotcha. So I mean, I think it's same principle. Okay, back, back. We're pulling it back to the palomeda. So ⁓ the grapefruit comes from either grapefruit soda or grapefruit juice with some club soda, right? But how does it work so well with tequila? Well, grapefruit balances the sweetness that can come from the agave and the bitterness of grapefruit like complements some of the vegetal notes in the tequila. like again, grapefruit and tequila are a nice match in terms of flavor profiles. We in a sidebar slightly, but talking about vegetal flavors, a smoky vegetal flavors, subbing out a tequila for a mezcal in this bad boy playing with that bitter note. Whoo, that could go really, really well. Absolutely. But then The fresh lime, again, mine called for it because of the way we were treating it like a margarita. We don't always do fresh lime in this type of Paloma. Sometimes it's again, one in one. Yeah. But the fresh lime does what? Well, what the lime juice does is it balances the drink with some acidity. If your grapefruit soda is a little on the sweet side ⁓ and the lime helps sharpen the drink. Like another way we could have made this instead of putting the lime juice in the drink, instead of that grapefruit slice, it could have been just tequila, squirt, and a lime wedge. And then taste it and then just adjust the acid from there. you know, garnish wise, you could have done the lime as well. Okay. So the salt that we've added, again, not necessary, not doing a salt rim like you potentially have on the traditional margarita types thing, but it doesn't have to be ⁓ A salt rim. could be, doesn't even have to be the saline. Like that's kind of elevated. Not everybody's going to have a dropper with saline solution behind their bar, but almost everybody has salt at their house. At any point in time, you could have just taken a pinch and just sprinkled it in. Same thing in here. Now it would have gone to the bottom of your glass. You definitely would have needed to do some steering, but I could have just easily put a pinch of salt in mine and shaken it up and it would have helped. do the same thing as a saline solution, maybe a little bit more effort or there may be some clumps at the bottom, but adding salt now, like before, elevates. adds flavor, like it accentuates that agave. ⁓ The bitterness from the grapefruit, now it has that kind of brighter bitter, not like sharp nasty, but brighter, like lovely bitter. ⁓ But it just, the salinity. does something to elevate the cocktail as well. It enhances it, much like salt enhances food. Yeah. Well, and I mean, we've gotten so much into the fruits and stuff. We've got go back to the spirit too. Okay. Let's talk about the spirit then. So, I mean, I think the big note here is of course, a hundred percent agave, but I would say... I would argue that your best choice here is Blanco Tequila. Over a Reposado, where we talked about the margarita could be a Blanco or a Reposado. Okay. Yeah. And part of that is ⁓ you've got crisper agave flavors. It's going to be brighter. And if you think about the flavor profile here, that brightness is going to blend in together. And then if we're talking about tradition, People in Mexico rarely, if ever, use a repasado or other aged tequila in their palomas. Yeah. The aged spirit in an agave ⁓ distillate is more for outsiders' flavor profile. Would that be fair? Yeah, in fact, a lot of times... The way the spirit is consumed in Mexico is wonko. Yep. Because it highlights the agave plant. it pays homage to the actual fruit itself. The thing that it's supposed to taste like and not imparting oak or vanilla or cacao or whatever you're going to finish the spirit in what barrel you're finishing in. Yeah, so I mean some of the Reposado on Yeho and certainly like categories like extra on Yeho, Cristalino are perhaps more geared toward the American palette, like and especially trying to appeal to like American whiskey drinkers. Yes. So yes, for a Paloma, Blanco is best. My apologies, Agave Spirit. I did not mean to overlook you in the conversation. ⁓ But let's go to the final part and it's how it was delivered. Porting glass built as a high ball and then shaken. So what did my shaken do to this thing? So the shaken is going to give us some more bright citrus aromatics. It also is going to give you more control over sweetness. You could have dialed back the simple syrup. You could have increased it depending on your flavor profile. Whereas in my classic paloma that's built in glass, the sugar, I'm mostly at the mercy of the sugar content of whatever grapefruit soda I choose to use. Yeah. And the only way that you could truly amp up the sugar would be pour more of the soda, which then potentially dilutes the cocktail, which again, it's supposed to be a lower ABV and that could be what you're going for. And really the shaken fresh juice version, offers maybe a more complex texture. Yes. Right, because you're getting the aeration from shaking that I'm not getting in my simple building glass cocktail. I mean, if we put them both up front, you can definitely see on yours, there is no kind of acidic kind of, you know, fluffy aeration there. You do get some of the cloudiness from your grape soda, but that's just the soda itself, the color of the soda. Where in my cocktail, I mean, across the entire rim as you're throwing it, you got the fresh juice pulp and whatever is clinging. And then there's still bubbles that are clinging to the side of the glass as well. So that aeration is full in effect. Yes. Okay. And so again, just different approaches, but the shaken one adds a different note to it. Okay. We've talked about the cocktail and how we've built it differently and some of the variations. But let's go back to the history of the Paloma and more instead of the origins, let's actually talk about the Paloma as, I don't know, the Mexican drinking culture. It's their number one agave cocktail. Go into that. So again, the Paloma is the most widely consumed tequila cocktail. in Mexico, it's more widely consumed than the margarita, largely because it's simple. Yep. Right? Especially the building glass version. It's accessible. It's less intense, more sessionable in that sense. ⁓ In Mexico, the Paloma isn't primarily like a bar drink. It's more like a, ⁓ we're having a backyard barbecue or something and just Tequila, grapefruit soda, or you're going to visit to get some street food, something like that. There's no need to shake a cocktail or anything, it's just simple. ⁓ In my mind right now, I have a vision of... cracking open the bottle, taking a swig of the squirt and just pulling the one and a half to two ounces of tequila in there, putting your thumb on top and kind of like letting it go and then sipping it. And that's your street food. I've ordered my taco from my, know, some kind of like bitter, Vera taco kind of thing. And then getting my drink and it's right there. Imagine going to like. Chopper, right? If that was like something they had on them, that'd be pretty cool. Yeah. And I mean, turn out tacos. Like the Paloma is great in terms of food pairings because it pairs well with tacos, grilled meats and spicy dishes because the bitterness of the grapefruit helps cut through the fat of the meat. The acidity of the line brightens the flavor. Like you talked about squeezing a lime over tacos. And the salt that little bit of saline in both drinks like echoes some of the seasoning again makes the food taste more like itself. ⁓ yeah. I've fatty beef like doing some kind of, I don't know, like carne asada or carnitas or something like that. Yeah. This goes perfectly with it because that bitterness pairs so dang good. Like it's so well with it. Yeah. I mean, if you think like tannins and why not? Well, not exactly analogous to bitterness of the flavors, you know, because our tongues can only taste salt, salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami. know, like tannins, which kind of scrape our palates and reset that they would be closest to the bitterness. And so like it's helping cleanse our palate. Or the other thing that I think about is like drinking a cup of coffee after eating a bowl of ice cream, right? It resets your palate. So after you're eating like some carnitas, like you were talking about, then taking a sip of the Paloma, it's gonna refresh and reset the palate before that next bite. Then now that we've introduced this kind of food culture into it, does that play into the ⁓ resurgence? I wouldn't even call it a resurgence, just like... the growth in popularity because it was never really popular in the US. It never like was here then went away. It's now it's kind of it's got this big growth. So talk let's talk about that maybe like. Yeah, I mean in the last decade plus the Paloma has become a global cocktail bar staple. Part of it's the surging popularity of agave spirits more generally. Right. Whether it's tequila or mezcal people are more interested in those spirits than they ever have been before. Then as they grow, does this will will this always be a staple or will we consider this one day a tequila classic? I I would argue it's already a classic, right? It's just, ⁓ you know, what version do you have in and to it's like a classic. in the sense of like a gemintonic movie is so simple, you don't even think about it as a classic or as you suggest, if you just build a ploma and bottle, like that's something easy. You can eat and drink on the go. And, I think part of the popularity of the ploma is drinkers are seeking a lighter, more refreshing cocktails. And I mean, this is delicious. It hits all of their, all of those key components that they're looking for. Absolutely. Well, let's pay homage to this classic and wrap it up in a sweet bow. What do we have here? So whether you prefer the classic grapefruit soda version or the shaken version with the fresh citrus, the Paloma is certainly one of tequila's most refreshing expressions. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Paloma. ⁓ Go ahead and make your version. Hell, make both versions and find out which one you like the most. Or maybe if it's sessionable, you're outdoors and you need that one and then you're doing a classy, you know, dinner and want to do something like the shaken version. Or try it with mezcal. But let us know about it. Leave us a comment. We are currently on ⁓ TikTok. Instagram, YouTube, we do have podcast listening version audio versions on Apple and Spotify. And then ⁓ if you got a lot, a larger format question comment that you want to send to us, shoot us an email at podcast at into the bar archive.com. We would love to hear from you. And we're pretty quick and responding back to those that are sending stuff into us. Yeah. And next time on into the bar archive, we shift from specific drinks. to a person. Ooh, we're going back to an individual. I like these. Yeah. So next time we're going to talk about one of the most influential bartenders of the cocktail Renaissance, Sasha Petrosky. Ooh, the speakeasy? Yep. He founded Milk and Honey and was really the architect of the modern speakeasy bar. And he mentored countless bartenders who continue to shape the craft cocktail scene today. ⁓ his family tree is ginormous. Absolutely. And so it's going to be a great episode. And until next time, keep exploring the past one drink at a time as we dive deeper into the bar hive. Cheers.