I'm OK, Tequila's OK For Breakfast

by Emerson Beyer

Because I live in a college town, the back-to-school season gives me one awful flashback after another. The sidewalks are a cringe-worthy pageant of undergraduates reenacting the libidinous idiocy of my own youth. It’s not unlike re-reading the middle chapters of Brideshead Revisited each fall, if Waugh had added in sorority girls. Though autumn may evoke spiced cider to the innocent of heart, to me it’s the season of the margarita — the season of puking on a bouncer and getting kicked off public transit late on a Sunday (yes, Sunday) night. Over the past 15 years, I have gradually reclaimed my ability to have a healthy, adult friendship with tequila, rebuilding the trust we once had step by delicious step.

So much reconciliation happens over a good meal, when we live in the sensory moment and let past hurts drift into history. I am going to help you reclaim your dignity and trust by spending some time with tequila in the kitchen. The results will put you in a mind of Mom and home, rather than Mom would be ashamed and How will I get home?

Don’t jump immediately to the assumption that cooking with tequila means Mexican food. Tequila is a liquor, not a theme. And even if I wanted to steer you to Mexican cooking, I couldn’t teach you much. I have an enormous respect for the variety and complexity of Mexican food, and I’d be happier if you consulted an expert.

Sin embargo, in crafting a tequila-fortified meal, the old adage applies: “If it grows together, it goes together.” Many of the central ingredients and tastes of “Mexican” food (indulge the shorthand) belong in these recipes: acidic fruit and tomatoes, corn, herbs, mild cheese, and peppers both spicy and sweet. My goal is to help you cook, not force you to shop, so I assure you that you can do a lot with ingredients you have at hand no matter the grocery situation in your neighborhood.

No fevered hunts for the best tequila, either. Buy a bottle you’ll like sipping while you cook. I suggest cooking with tequila reposado, that is, tequila that’s been aged a few months in oak. It retains the traditional vegetal tequila flavors but is a little sweeter and more wine-like, so it melds with other components better than unaged tequila (labeled blanco or silver). I chose Tequila Espolon because it had the least shameful/racist/douchey branding of any on the shelf. It turned out to be pretty good!

SAFE AND SWEET
A way to reunite with tequila without the risk of getting up to your old shenanigans is to do it during the day among friends who don’t know your embarrassing past. Tomorrow at work, invite some colleagues over to watch the Texas-Oklahoma game on Saturday&emdash;a frozen tequila dessert will be great during the second half (after nachos, of course, in the first half). Tequila goes so well with citrus juices and tart fruit purees, it requires almost no instructions at all to figure out how to make a lime- or pineapple-tequila sorbet. Here’s a recipe to build on. If you don’t have an ice-cream maker, put the mixture in a baking pan in the freezer, and stir it up with a fork every 20 minutes until it’s all frozen and slushy. (This won’t stay slushy forever, so make it Friday night.)

For something more adventurous, you can make a simple syrup with tequila and one of the “woodier” herbs (rosemary or thyme); you can use this to flavor anything from ice cream to buttercream to pound cake, substituting all or part of the sugar in a recipe. Of course, you already know about Margarita Cupcakes.

SIZZLE
Your most basic, minimal-prep use of tequila for dinner is in the sauté pan. A shot of tequila in there with fish, sliced skirt steak, or even firm veggies like green beans or bell peppers will come through very nicely. You can even flambé, though you won’t get that syrupy, reduced sauce you’d get from whiskey.

If you’re going the vegetable route, you need to make sure there’s a good deal of fat in the pan. Tequila will play up some of the “green” and bitter flavors (in a good way!), but this needs to be balanced. I suggest sautéing in butter (rather than oil) and also crumbling some nice salty, mild cheese like queso fresco over the dish.

With a little more planning but a lot less effort, you can also marinade meat in tequila that you’ll later grill. A booze marinade is particularly good if you want to impart spiciness from, say, jalapeños into the meat, because capsaicin is soluble in alcohol and fat.

A simple tequila-and-fruit sauce will be great on sautéed or grilled meat or seafood. I made one with nectarines, rosemary and jalapeño. (NB: I wanted to use fresh cayenne but mine overstayed its welcome in the crisper, so I used jalapeño instead. As for the fruit, you could substitute anything tart and firm-but-not-hard, like plums or green mangoes.) Here’s how to do it: Reduce a cup of tequila over medium-low heat to about half. Meanwhile, soften a diced onion in another saucepan. Add two peeled, chopped nectarines to the onions to start them softening. Pour the tequila in with the fruit and add the chilis and herbs. You want to keep this on the heat until the fruit is pretty well cooked. Partially smash the resulting mixture with a wooden spoon before serving. This particular combination is great on crab cakes, which I served with spicy mashed turnips.

SAUCE
I promised that we wouldn’t dwell on dumbed-down Tex-Mex because tequila is more versatile than that, and frankly we don’t need to be dredging up any spring break memories you may have from San Padre Island.

So, remember how tequila’s “green” flavors benefit from fat? To play that up, you can make a creamy, mildly peppery sauce that is great with fried fish, chicken or pork.

Do you know how to make béchamel? Definitely memorize this, because it’s very versatile. (I never know how much and where to cuss in a recipe, so please revise according to your own fucking preferences.)

1. Warm up a saucepan on a medium burner. Put two cups of milk in a glass measuring cup in the microwave for three minutes. (If you have no microwave, just do this in a separate pan. Bring it to a boil.)

2. Melt two tablespoons of butter. Wait for the foam to subside.

3. Sprinkle three tablespoons of flour over the butter, one tablespoon at a time, whisking between each. Make sure it gets very well combined. After the third tablespoon, keep whisking for about a minute. Let it get half a shade more golden so you can be sure the flour is cooking a bit. Nothing bad will happen if you let this darken a little, but the resulting flavor will be more gravy-like. (FYI, this is roux.)

4. Slowly pour the hot milk into the pan while whisking vigorously. It will thicken pretty quickly. Add a generous amount of salt (and white pepper if you have it). Don’t let it get too thick, which will happen if you keep cooking it or if you let it cool off. Keep it warm on a low burner or in the oven

Okay, so now that you can make a béchamel, you can modify it a zillion different ways. What I have done is softened diced poblano peppers in butter, reduced a cup of tequila by half, then added the tequila to the peppers and simmered them together for 10 minutes, then poured the mixture into the béchamel. This is not at all spicy, so a few shakes of Cholula bring it to life. I served the sauce over cornmeal-crusted fish with cumin-scented pumpkin on the side.

SUNSHINE
Nothing can help you recapture a wholesome, platonic friendship with tequila like having it for a civilized breakfast — and not in the “hair of the dog” sense. Tequila is definitely a late riser and doesn’t come easily to the morning meal, though you could overcome that resistance quickly and simply by pouring a shot into a pan of sausage hash.

A more adult approach to getting tequila at breakfast might be a tequila tomato sauce to serve with corn and a fried egg. The sugar from slowly stewed fresh tomatoes works into tequila’s woody, slightly sulfuric structure beautifully. Here’s how to make tequila tomato sauce — bear in mind that you could use dry white wine instead of tequila. Also bear in mind you’ll need to make this in advance unless “breakfast” for you is in the middle of the afternoon.

1. Sauté three cloves of garlic in a thick layer of oil over medium heat.

2. Throw six chopped tomatoes in the pan. Do not peel or seed these tomatoes; you’ll lose flavor, and it’s not worth the effort. I like to add chopped oregano at this point, but parsley, tarragon or the traditional basil would be great, too. Sprinkle everything with salt.

3. Add 3/4 cup of tequila to the pan and reduce the heat to low. Simmer for 1–1/2 to 2 hours. Stir periodically, ensuring that nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pan.

4. After everything is really soft and soupy, put it all in a mesh strainer over a bowl. Use a rubber scraper to push it through. Tomato skins and some other undesirable bits will be left behind.

This weekend, I served this sauce with both grits and corn salad, though a reasonable person would have done one or the other. For the corn salad, I cut fresh corn off the cob, sautéed it in a little oil, squeezed a lime over it and crumbled queso fresco into the bowl. If you add a fried egg, don’t let it be too runny — you already have a sauce, and you don’t want a weird, goopy mess.

There should be no doubt about what is the perfect beverage to serve with this breakfast: Tequila Sunrise.

K. Emerson Beyer, environmentalist and gadabout, lives in Durham, N.C. and tweets as @patebrisee.

Thanks to Martin Solem for his experiments in tilt-shift photography.