Take Your Margarita To The Next Level And Grill Your Citrus

While tips for crafting the perfect margarita typically include using quality tequila and fresh lime juice, one additional simple tweak can make a noticeable difference in flavor. Taking time to grill the citrus fruit you pair with your concoctions can invite a wonderful smoky and caramelized flavor layer to your margarita recipes. Whether you use a grilled wheel of grapefruit as a garnish or extract the juice of grilled lemons and limes to create a more complex and nuanced sourness to add to your mix, you'll be well on your way to feeling like a professional bartender with this trick.

The pretty char marks left behind on the rinds of your citrus peels can also add to the aesthetics of your margarita glasses, and you can experiment with using different kinds of fruit while making your drinks, too. You can also play around with complementary pairings. For example, if you like a smokier cocktail, you can play up this factor even more by adding mezcal and spices alongside grilled grapefruit. Similarly, you can amplify sweeter notes in your beverages by coating sliced citrus in sugar before setting them onto the grill.

The sky is the limit when it comes to choosing the best fruit for your margarita, though selecting those with complementary flavors is usually a good place to start. Grill slices of grapefruit and jalapeño peppers to use in our spicy grapefruit mezcal margarita recipe, or fire up halves of mangoes to blend smooth with lime juice and triple sec for a mixture that can be shaken up with booze and served. Grilled pineapple can help balance out the sweetness of reposado tequila-based pineapple margaritas, while grilled strawberries can add depth to a refreshing frozen strawberry margarita. Even a classic frozen margarita recipe can be jazzed up with the inclusion of juice squeezed fresh from limes that have first been grilled to perfection. 

Feel free to add spices and seasonings to the fruit — cinnamon, cayenne pepper, chili powder, Tajín, or sea salt — to invite even more flavor into your drink recipes. Always start with a clean grill when grilling fruit, and use metal skewers, like this set that's available on Amazon, as needed to keep cut pieces intact and perched above the flames. When cooking fruits on the grill, make more than what you think you'll need. You can use grilled fruit as an ice cream topping or incorporate it into a variety of other recipes. Or, you can simply pack the pieces away to snack on when afternoon hunger pangs hit. Though firing up the grill to make drinks might seem laborious, your dinner guests will be able to detect the extra effort from the very first sip.