The perfect... Bloody Mary

Your cut-out-and-keep guide to the fundamentals of cooking

Ithink people like a Bloody Mary because it’s spicy and refreshing and not too sweet, unlike a lot of aperitif drinks. The key to a Bloody Mary is the tomato juice, I think. You can buy good tomato juices, but there’s nothing to beat making your own. For this recipe, for four people, you’d need to juice about eight good-sized, vine-ripened tomatoes. And they need to be very ripe. They need to be soft; too soft to use in a salad, for example. In fact, when you have tomatoes that are too ripe, they can be juiced and the tomato juice can be put in the freezer until you need it. A proper electric juicer will do your tomatoes in no time and will filter out all the skin, pips and pulp. If you don’t have a juicer, though, you can just whizz the tomatoes in a food processor and then strain out all the bits. We make our tomato juice the night before we need it, and we put the vine into it, and leave it in the fridge. Leaving the vine in is something I once saw Rick Stein do on the TV. He was making a tomato sauce, but I thought it would work for tomato juice, too. In the restaurant, we also leave the vine in overnight with gazpacho. It gives an incredibly intense tomato flavour. Our recipe has a few tiny twists, just to give interest to the spiciness. With a Bloody Mary, it’s a mistake to add more Tabasco in order to increase the spice. Tabasco has a very hard chilli edge, and it makes the drink taste rough if you add too much. So we get different heat with the fresh horseradish and the curry powder. The horseradish has a refreshing spiciness, and the curry powder has a warm heat. It creates a fantastically spicy drink that gives you a real boost. To serve, we add a celery stick; it’s a swizzle stick and a snack in one. Serves 4.

You will need:

40g (1½oz) freshly grated horseradish 2 teaspoons boiling water 240ml (8½fl oz) fresh tomato juice, freshly juiced if possible 60ml (2fl oz) good-quality vodka 60ml (2fl oz) Worcestershire sauce 12 drops Tabasco 4 good pinches celery salt Freshly ground black pepper 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice ¾ of a teaspoon curry powder Ice cubes 4 celery sticks and four wedges of lime, to serve

Method:

Put the freshly grated horseradish into a bowl and add the 2 teaspoons of boiling water. Leave it sit for 5 minutes and then squeeze out the excess water. This will rehydrate the horseradish and take a lot of the raw flavour from it. Next, in a jug, mix together the freshly grated horseradish, the fresh tomato juice, the vodka, the Worcestershire sauce, the Tabasco, the celery salt, the freshly ground black pepper, the freshly squeezed lime juice and the curry powder. Mix well. Fill four highball glasses with ice and pour in the mixture. Serve each Bloody Mary with a celery stick and a lime wedge.

Wade Murphy is the chef/owner of 1826 Adare, Main St, Adare, Co Limerick, tel: (061) 396-004, or see 1826adare.ie In conversation with Sarah Caden