BVC Eats: La bruja te prende fuego

I’m a two-margarita girl. When I lunch with my pals, I can pour them down between layers of food and I’m fine. Never met a margarita that intimidated me. This was before I met mezcal.

This recipe is adapted from something I had in a Mexican restaurant that kicked me straight in the frontal lobes. The pal I was lunching with was concerned. She forced me to eat Homer’s Pecan-Praline^TM ice cream before I assayed the drive home. Probably for the best. Later I learned that the drink contained mezcal, which makes tequila look like mother’s fermented milk.

After some epic dreams and a stage wait sufficient to erase the memory of morning-after wooziness, I set about trying to duplicate the recipe and failed. I came up with this instead. That nice-looking bald guy in the liquor department at Valli sold me top-drawer mezcal, he said, plus the correct orange liqueur. I had some other stuff lying around: plenty of limes and lime juice, and a dandy smoked red jalapeño sauce (i.e. chipotle sauce) from Bufalo^TM. And La Bruja’s your uncle. (Er, aunt.)

La Bruja has that spicy, kerosene-like edge you get with tequila, plus orange and lemon comfort flavors, that reassuring white-sugar-crunch on the rim, and a deep red sweet smoky heat that comes from the chipotle sauce.

Be careful with the mezcal. It’s next-level shit.

I’m calling it:

LA BRUJA TE PRENDE FUEGO
(the witch sets you on fire)
or
La Bruja (for short)

Put into an 8-oz measuring cup:

2 teaspoons Bufalo^TM brand chipotle sauce

With your finger, smear just the top rim of a thick hand-blown 12-oz glass tumbler pretty thickly with the chipotle sauce.

Dip the sauced rim in plain white granulated sugar. Let it build up a nice thick coating. Put a tablespoon of sugar (dry) in the bottom of the glass. Put the glass aside to set up a little.

Add to the remainder of the chipotle sauce in the measuring cup:

2 oz Casamigas^TM mezcal
2 oz Citronge^TM orange liqueur
2 oz or more fresh or bottled lime juice

Stir until the chipotle sauce has distributed evenly throughout the liquors. It will make your drink cloudy.

Add 8 to 10 oz crushed ice to the chipotle-and-sugar-rimmed glass.

Pour the liquors over the ice.

Top with two thin slices of fresh lime and maybe a long thin straw (for getting a hit of that sugar on the bottom).

Let it chill, then drink. Carefully. Don’t plan to walk or drive if you have more than one.