I had always preferred the traditional lime margarita, but that changed when we spent time in Mexico last fall. My wife had a mango margarita at the suggestion of a waiter. It took a couple of more visits to restaurants before she convinced me to try one. It was okay but nothing to write home about.

Then she started to make them herself. She kept after me to try them and slowly but surely she was winning me over to them. The problem was there was something about her recipe that just wasn’t right for my taste. I’ve always been willing to experiment, and experiment I did. She was making her margaritas by first making a concentrate, then adding ice and water before drinking.

My first task was to come up with what I felt was the correct concentrate. Mango juice, triple sec and tequila were the ingredients. Since Jumex Mango Nectar is readily available I settled in on it. (Other brands are okay but we like Jumex the best.) Since the overwhelming flavor was the mango a few tests and we concluded it made very little difference to our taste buds which brand of tequila or triple sec we used. (By the third margarita it makes absolutely no difference.)

As you can see we make our margarita concentrate in a one quart jar. We weigh out the ingredients precisely each time we make the concentrate. The ingredients are: 16 fluid ounces of mango nectar, 3 fluid ounces of triple sec and 6 fluid ounces of tequila. We keep all the ingredients and the premade margarita concentrate in the refrigerator. It is the ratio of ingredients that is important, 16:3:6 in our case. You can make yours at any ratio you prefer, just keep it consistent once you determine what you like best.

When the time for enjoying a mango margarita arrives, we add 6 fluid ounces of our premade margarita concentrate, 2.5 fluid ounces of ice and 2.5 fluid ounces of water to the glass, stir, and enjoy. Again it is the ratio that is important, not the actual amounts. This gives us both the taste we like which is actually very unusual since our tastes in foods and beverages usually differ with me preferring strong and spicy, with my wife being the opposite. The key to all this is for everyone to experiment to find what they like best, then make it the same way every time. And in case you might be wondering, no margaritas were consumed during the writing of this post.