Lemon Drop

This often gets lumped in with martinis. It’s not, really, but I won’t get into it now. What is indisputable is this: it’s delicious! Lemon trees all around me are begging me to lighten their load, and this should be a big help.

Ensuring that deliciousness requires paying close attention to ingredient choice. A good, clean-flavored vodka is important, but even more key is not trying to replace fresh-squeezed lemon juice with any bottled lemon juice, however fresh or not-from-concentrate or whatever it promises. Seriously, if you don’t have fresh lemons handy, don’t attempt this. (Exception: If you’ve juiced lemons and quickly frozen the result, that should work fine. In fact, I highly recommend doing so whenever an excess of fruit is handy.) A half lemon is also useful for wetting the edge of the glass to make the sugar rim.

You can get away with granulated sugar for this, but it’ll involve some serious shaking. Superfine sugar is much easier to deal with. You can use it to rim the glass, too, though I personally prefer the look of the larger granulated sugar crystals.

The recipe below is derived from Oprah’s famous “Legends Lemon Drop Martini.” After that I’ve included the recipe that, so far as I can tell, most bars use. It’s also quite good (and smaller, and not nearly so sweet), but I prefer the first version.

Lemon Drop (best)
· martini, chilled, sugar-rimmed
2 T. sugar
3 vodka
3 lemon juice (juice of 3 lemons)

Lemon Drop (usual)
· martini, chilled, sugar-rimmed
1 t. sugar
1 1/2 vodka
1/2 triple sec
3/4 lemon juice (1 smallish lemon)

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