The Ultimate Spicy Margarita Requires A Special Chili Oil Trick

The bright tang and smooth tequila in a classic margarita make it a quintessential summertime cocktail. As the seasons change and the temperatures start to drop, tropical cocktails tend to give way to cozier beverages that warm you from the inside out. And a bit of chili oil can turn this sunny weather favorite into a perfect fall cocktail.

To infuse your tequila with the flavorful heat of chili oil, combine 3 ounces of chili oil with 1 liter of blanco tequila. Since you'll be making a cocktail with a lot of mixer ingredients, save your more flavorful (and expensive) reposados and añejos for more tequila-forward cocktails or solo sipping. Allow the flavors to mingle at room temperature for at least a couple of hours — or longer, for more intense chili flavor — stirring occasionally, then pop the whole concoction into the freezer for about 24 hours.

As the infused tequila chills overnight, the oil and liquor separate, and the oil forms a thin layer on top of the liquor. When you take the container out of the freezer, you'll be able to lift the frozen disc of chili oil off the top. Strain the mixture through a coffee filter or cheesecloth to remove any remaining solids, and you're left with a satisfyingly spicy liquor that you can mix into your favorite margarita recipe.

Once you add chili oil to tequila to infuse it with flavor and spice, you open up a whole new world of cocktail experimentation through fat-washing. The technique first emerged in 2007, when bartender Don Lee combined bacon and bourbon in the legendary Benton's Old Fashioned at Please Don't Tell in New York. The science is simple — a flavorful fat imparts its flavor to liquor at room temperature, and a hard freeze forces the fat and liquid to separate, leaving nothing but the flavor behind.

And it's the simplicity of this technique that lends itself so well to lots of other cocktail combinations. In fact, Lee himself learned about fat-washing from another New York bartender, Eben Freeman, who is perhaps best known for washing rum with brown butter. Other fat-washed liquors you may want to experiment with include olive oil and vodka for a delightfully nuanced dirty martini, whiskey and brown butter for a smooth-as-silk whiskey sour, and coconut oil and tequila for a tantalizingly tropical tequila sunrise. But why stop there? You can fat-wash just about any liquor with just about any fat, including cheese and even fatty vegetables like okra and avocado.