The Beloved Garden Vegetable That Gives Margaritas A New Flavor Profile (And It's Not Jalapeño)

The perfect margarita is a go-to cocktail choice, spawning hit songs and legions of devotees. This libation has long lent itself to creative margarita flavor variations on the classic, with the addition of everything from hibiscus and mango to passion fruit. While summer's garden bounty is still in her glory, we're here to offer up an inventive, sweet, and vegetal take on this favorite tipple by featuring tomato.

Stick with us here. Tomato has the unusual ability to read both savory and sweet, making it a surprising and yet supremely pleasant flavor profile, and it can be woven into a margarita in a number of ways. You may be thinking that tomato equals heavy and viscous like your grandma's V8, but it doesn't have to. Sure, you can make a tomato margarita spicy like with the addition of Aleppo pepper, but you can also grill the tomato to bring out the sugars and toasty notes or even incorporate a lush yet light and sweet tomato simple syrup that screams summer in any cocktail. For the final vibrant touch, try suspending a cute cherry tomato in a singular large ice cube, or simply garnish your drink with a skewer of teeny tomatoes.

To really take the tomato play further, you can mix up your margarita liquor of choice. While many margaritas feature tequila, mezcal lends smokier notes to the cocktail, which can be a fun combo with the tomato. What is the difference between tequila and mezcal? Well, they're both made from the agave plant, but the piña, or core of the plant, is steamed to make tequila, while it's roasted to make mezcal (hence the smokiness). Technically, all tequilas are mezcals, but the same isn't true in reverse.

To push the envelope even further in flavor complexity, consider making your tomato margarita a 50/50. A creation of New York bartender Natasha Bermudez, the 50/50 margarita refers to using half mezcal and half manzanilla sherry, which ups the salinity and plays particularly well with the sweetness of the tomatoes. However you choose to feature tomato in your margarita, consider doing it sooner than later while the crop is still at its peak, and take plenty of pictures for wistful gazing once the weather turns cooler.