This Pink Drink Is My Favorite Way to Consume Rhubarb
Welcome to Never Fail, a weekly column where we wax poetic about the recipes that never, ever let us down.
Thrumppp. That was five pounds of rhubarb being kerplunked into my trunk at Detroit’s Eastern Market contactless pickup last weekend. I had to reserve that sour stalky weed a week in advance! Five-pound bags only! Okay! But rhubarb—or as I pronounce it in the Princess Bride “mawwiage” voice, WOO-BAHBBB—is something to get hyped about.
Cakes, pies, galettes, brown butter jam bars! The weird wannabe-celery gets sweet and tangy when it’s cooked, and maybe most importantly, retains its flashy pink color in a way purple asparagus wishes it could. Rhubarb is vanity.
Which is why my favorite way to play with it is to make blushing pink rhubarb daiquiris, recipe courtesy of Lily Mirabelle Freedman. Her recipe requires making a rhubarb simple syrup and some light upper body work—cocktail shaking. But that’s never stopped me before.
After I made the syrup, squeezed in some lemon juice, and let it cool, it was cocktail time. I stretched the definition of daiquiri to contain tequila as I was out of rum, and then I made one with gin for my mother-out-of-law, because, as she retells it, “the last time I had tequila I got arrested.”
But please don’t alert the professional cocktail people. Rum, tequila, vodka, moonshine, whatever! The combination of sweet-sour rhubarb, lime juice, and booze is fail proof. The fam loved it. “Wooobahb!” we exclaimed as we clinked glasses. I regretted not making a double batch. Until next year.
Make it:
Rhubarb Daiquiri
Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
