Strawberries and the promise Summer

Here's how to make an incredible strawberry mescalita

I have a lifelong love affair with strawberries. The pure red sensuous shape, the little green handle, the tiny seeds, they hold a brief promise of the perfect culinary moment as well as seasonal joy. Savor it quickly because, like summer, fresh, real strawberries don’t last long.

Strawberries are also a molecular marvel. That sweet/acidic/earthy/caramely strawberry taste is the result of about 350 molecules.  Some of the molecules are incredibly important to the berry taste and smell and others less so. Change them and the strawberry changes. Dial up gamma-decalactone, for example, and the strawberry will start to taste like peaches.

Strawberry season here on Martha’s Vineyard is brief, very brief, like 3 weeks brief. It starts in mid June and ends when Wimbleton ends. But for strawberry lovers, those three weeks are an edible valentine, a moment of zen, an ode to the perfect summer moment.

Strawberry season is also competitive. You have to arrive at the local farm stand, Morning Glory, at the exact moment they are bringing in the berries from the field. That happens about once an hour. Within 5 minutes, strawberry lovers have grabbed all the baskets off the shelf. If you aren’t there, forget about it. It’s an hour wait for the next batch. Last week, I scored with my timing and nabbed 3 boxes.

My daughter, a cocktail lover, was visiting, so what could be more natural than playing around with a strawberry-based cocktail. We thought about a strawberry marguarita but we were missing some key ingredients, namely tequila and Cointreau. But we did have mescal, tequila’s mother and a smokier version of the agave drink. We created something with what was on hand, figuring out amounts via taste as we went along.

Here's what we did: we loaded and crushed these ingredients in a blender:

·      about a cup of sliced fresh berries,

·      2 mint leaves, maybe 3. It was an experiment

·      about an inch of jalapena pepper, with seeds

·      juice of one lime

·      ¼ cup of simple syrup

·      ¼ cup of smokey mescal

·      Ice

We tasted as we went along, to get the balance right.

Then we salted the rim of a glass by rubbing the lime rind on the glass and dipping it in salt. We poured in our drink,deco rated the glass with a cut strawberry and sipped it on the back porch. It was definitely a moment of zen.

Try it and let me know how it goes. Or send me your perfect strawberry moment so we can build the ultimate strawberry-hazed blog of summer loves.