How To - Best Bloody Mary's Ever.

How to make the best Bloody Mary you’ll ever have. 

So, everyone knows that a good Bloody Mary is the perfect way to slide into an evening session or maybe even a cheeky pick me up in the afternoon. Either way, there are do’s-and-don’ts.

This is the way I’ve been taught to make a Bloody Mary, with my own preferences thrown in too.

You will need to acquire the following;

-          One bottle of the regular, normal old tomato juice. Britvic or Schweppes is fine, Big Tom is not. Big Tom is already spiced so you don’t really want to use that one if you’re into tailoring your own drink. Also, if you use Big Tom it will make everything I’m about to say entirely irrelevant.

-          A double, or  50ml’s, of regular vodka. Smirnoff,  Absolut ...whatever floats your boat.

-          A ‘little’ splash of Tabasco sauce.

-          A generous splash of Lea & PerrinsWorcestershire Sauce.

-          A sprinkle of Celery Salt, which you can by in the spice section of most full-size supermarkets. By full-size, I mean not a Tesco Metro. You need a proper big boy supermarket.

-          Ice

-          Lemon slice.

-          Celery stick (if you want)

1.       Combine all ingredients except juice and lemon into your glass. Stir.

2.       Pour half of your juice into your glass. Stir.

3.       Fill your glass with juice, stir and add in your lemon.

4.       Slide your celery stick in as an edible-stirer.

5.       Enjoy.

For those who don’t want ice in their juice, try this version. This is the version I make at the bar, or if I’m not being lazy. Me? Lazy? Ahem.

1.    Pour ice, vodka, celery salt, Lea & Perrins and Tabasco into a pint glass.

2.   Pour mixture into another pint glass, and then back again into the original. 

3.   Pour half of your tomato juice into the mixture (still in a pint glass).

4.   Repeat step two.

5.   Add remaining tomato juice.

6.    Repeat step two.

7.    Strain and serve into a half-pint glass, garnish with celery and or lemon.  Your Bloody Mary will be chilled from the ice in the pint glasses and will not have dissolving cubes floating about in it.

8.     Enjoy.

If you would prefer a Virgin Mary, simply follow steps 1 through 8, but don’t add the Vodka at the start. Et voila – the perfect brunch juice drink for your friends on Saturday morning.

If you'd like more recipes for cocktails and things of the like, BBC Online has some good ones, or if you want something a little sexier and daring try out the cocktails on Esquire, who are doing awesome Whiskey Cocktails for Fall at the moment. (which is Autumn to us Brits.) 

Hope you have enjoyed this how-to. I’ve quite enjoyed making it, so maybe there’ll be more of this kind of thing going on. Let me know if you do like this, if you don’t, if you like Bloody Mary’s, if you don’t. Yadda yadda yadda.