Frozen Daiquiri
White rum, lime and sugar blended with ice to a slush, poured without a shake or a stir.
Serving
Drink spec, per drink
Every figure above is per drink and does not move with the count, which is what makes the two service modes comparable. Sugar per litre, strength and standard drinks stay in the units their own authorities publish, because they are figures for comparing rather than for pouring.
Diet and allergen labels are computed from the ingredients listed on this page and nothing else. They cannot account for cross-contamination or for the particular product you buy, and they are not medical or safety guidance.
Ingredients
25 ml fresh lime juice
60 ml white rum
25 ml simple syrup
200 g water
- 25 ml fresh lime juice
- 60 ml white rum
- 25 ml simple syrup
- 200 g water
Glass
Vessel
310 ml of liquid, served without ice, inside the 350 ml the glass holds. The build fails if a recipe ever exceeds its stated vessel.
A batch needs a vessel that closes and fits a fridge shelf.
Method
4 steps · 1m 50sSqueeze the 25 ml fresh lime juice and strain out the pips and pulp.
Combine the 25 ml fresh lime juice, the 60 ml white rum and the 25 ml simple syrup in a blender jug, then add the 200 g water.
The syrup here runs above what the shaken Daiquiri takes, because a drink served this cold reads markedly less sweet than the same liquid would at room temperature. The correction has to be made before the ice goes in, since there is no tasting a slush and adjusting it after.
Blend in short bursts for 30s, until the mixture climbs the sides of the jug as an even, pourable slush with no loose chunks left clicking against the blade.
Pour, unstrained, into a chilled poco grande glass and serve with a straw before it starts to separate.
Common pitfallBlending in short bursts keeps the drink cold; a single long run heats the jug against the blade and comes back looser and warmer than the same ice would if pulsed. It should look like wet sand climbing the sides, not a liquid with chips floating in it.
Keeping and make-ahead
This drink is made to order.
About
A Havana bartender's answer to the electric blender, built on the same rum, lime and sugar as the shaken Daiquiri three decades after it was invented.
Constantino Ribalaigua Vert, a Catalan immigrant known in Havana as "Constante," began tending bar at the restaurant then called La Florida in 1914 and bought the business in 1918, later renaming it El Floridita 1 2. The shaken Daiquiri, credited to an American mining engineer working near Santiago de Cuba around 1898, was already established by the time Constante took over the bar.
In the early 1930s, Constante adopted the newly available electric blender and used it to turn the same rum, lime and sugar into an iced, textured drink rather than a shaken and strained one 1 2. The frozen Daiquiri became the drink most associated with him, enough that El Floridita still bills itself as "la cuna del daiquiri," the cradle of the Daiquiri 1. Its ratios and lime-forward balance carried over from the shaken original; what changed was entirely the ice and the machine that could crush it into the drink rather than around it.
Ernest Hemingway drank at El Floridita through the 1930s and into the early 1940s, keeping a room nearby at the Hotel Ambos Mundos for several of those years and returning from his home outside Havana afterward 1. He was one of a group of regulars, including Graham Greene, drawn to Constante's bar in part because it drew a more local clientele than the tourist-oriented Sloppy Joe's 2. The Daiquiri he drank at El Floridita, and the one the bar's own bronze statue of him now commemorates, was Constante's frozen version rather than the shaken original from three decades earlier 1.
- 1Floriditaen.wikipedia.org
- 2Constantino Ribalaigua Vertlibrary.cocktailkingdom.com