Paloma

What to expect

Taste

It arrives dry, which surprises people who expect a soda-based drink to be sweet. The first thing on the tongue is acid — grapefruit's round, slightly soapy sourness with lime's sharper, greener acid laid over the top of it. The sugar in the soda is substantial but you barely register it as sweetness, because it is being cancelled from both sides by acid and by bitterness. Underneath sits the blanco tequila: raw agave, vegetal and faintly peppery, with a green, briny, almost olive-like edge that most drinkers read simply as 'clean'. Then the grapefruit pith arrives, a genuine bitterness from naringin, and the salt is there to hold it down to a rim rather than a wall. It finishes short, dry and slightly mineral, with a tightening along the sides of the tongue and a small warmth of agave at the back of the throat. Nothing lingers, which is precisely why the next sip happens so quickly.

Aroma

Grapefruit zest is the entire nose and it is a strange smell if you actually stop and think about it — bright and juicy, but with a sulphurous, struck-match, almost catty edge underneath. That is not imagination: grapefruit's signature comes from 1-p-menthene-8-thiol, a sulphur compound detectable at a couple of parts per trillion, sitting on top of nootkatone's woody bitterness. Lime oil rides above it, sharper and greener. The tequila is almost invisible on the nose while the drink is properly cold; as it warms you start to get cooked agave, which smells like sugar-cane steam or a very faint roasted sweetness. The salt makes all of this stronger rather than saltier, because salting a watery drink pushes its aromatic molecules out of the liquid and into the air above the glass.

Texture

Thin, with no body or viscosity at all — this is not a silky or a creamy drink and it should not be sold as one. All of its texture is carbonation: a prickling across the tongue and a faint scratch at the back of the throat that the brain reads as extra sharpness even though it is a physical sensation rather than a taste. The salt adds a very slight roundness in the middle of the mouth. When it goes flat, the texture collapses to thin and faintly sticky, which is the moment the drink is over.

Sound

This is a quiet drink and that is part of its character. There is no shaker, no strain, no rattle. What you get is the hiss as the soda hits the ice and lifts into foam, one or two dull knocks as the cubes settle, and the fine continuous crackle of carbonation which is audible if the room is quiet enough and the microphone is close enough. The bar spoon lifting from the bottom of the glass makes almost no sound at all, which is the point of doing it that way.

How the flavour moves

Salt and grapefruit oil before the liquid even arrives, off the rim and off the surface. Then the carbonic prickle and lime's fast, sharp attack. Sweetness appears in the middle and is gone almost as quickly as it came. The agave rises underneath it, peppery and green. And it lands on a clean bitterness spread across the back of the tongue, which is the reason it works: the drink finishes dry, so it never satisfies, so you go back. Sweet in the middle, dry at both ends. A margarita ends thick and rich and you put it down; a Paloma ends on nothing and you pick it up again.

Serve it

Cold enough that the glass hurts to hold for the first few seconds. Temperature does more for this drink than for almost anything else in the repertoire, because it controls two things at once: bitterness is perceived more strongly as a liquid warms, and dissolved carbon dioxide comes out of solution faster. A Paloma at room temperature is a bitter, flat, oddly sweet grapefruit drink. The same liquid at two degrees is one of the most refreshing things you can hand somebody.

Goes with

Tacos al pastor, carnitas, cochinita pibil, ceviche and aguachile, grilled fish, anything charred off a barbecue. The mechanism is worth knowing: acid, salt and carbonation between them strip fat off the palate faster than a still drink can, so the Paloma resets the mouth after every bite of pork. It is also the right thing next to salty snacks — chicharron, peanuts with chilli and lime, mango or jicama dusted with Tajin — where the salt in the food and the salt in the drink meet halfway.

Cook's notes

Difficulty

Easy. There is no technique to fail at — the only skills are measuring accurately and not stirring after the soda goes in.

Cost

Cheap per serve once the tequila is bought. The soda is the cheapest ingredient in the drink and does the most obvious work in it; the outlay is a bottle of 100 per cent agave blanco, which is the one thing not to economise on because there is nowhere for a rough tequila to hide.

Equipment

A tall glass, a jigger or a small measure, a citrus squeezer, a bar spoon (a long teaspoon works), and a saucer of flaky salt if you are rimming. No shaker, no strainer, no blender.

When to make it

Hot afternoons, long lunches, barbecues, and as the opening drink of an evening rather than the closing one. It is a drink that makes you hungry, so it belongs before food.

Best season

Drunk in the heat, so summer, but the ingredients are year-round. Fresh grapefruit is at its best in winter, which means the fresh-juice version of this drink is actually a cold-weather one — an inversion worth knowing if somebody asks why their summer grapefruit tasted of nothing.

You know it is done when

Pale pink and translucent, with a fine fast bead of small bubbles running up the inside of the glass rather than a foam head. Colour varies with the soda — Squirt gives an almost colourless drink, Jarritos Toronja a distinct pink — so a pale Paloma is not a weak one.

And it feels like

Taste it before it goes out. It should feel sharp and prickling rather than syrupy, and the finish should be dry. If it coats the tongue at all, there is too much soda and not enough lime.

Food safety

Nothing perishable is involved. Two things are worth knowing rather than warning about: grapefruit juice inhibits the CYP3A4 enzyme and interferes with a long list of prescription medicines, though most grapefruit sodas contain little or no real juice, so a Paloma made with soda is a much smaller concern than one made with fresh juice. And the drink contains a full 60ml measure of spirit under a great deal of soda, which makes it taste weaker than it is.

Where it goes wrong

• Stirring after the soda goes in. Two seconds of vigorous stirring costs most of the carbonation, which is most of the texture. Lift once with a spoon and stop.
• Warm soda. A room-temperature mixer over ice means the ice does the cooling, which means it melts, which means a watery drink before it reaches the table.
• Bottled lime juice, which has a cooked, faintly bitter note that sits exactly where the grapefruit already is and makes the whole drink taste stale.
• Salting the entire rim, so every sip is a salty one and the drinker has no choice. Half the rim, on the outside.
• Leaving the salt out of the liquid because it sounds wrong. It is the difference between the drink tasting sharp and tasting sour.
• Reaching for a reposado or anejo because it is the better bottle. Oak and vanilla fight grapefruit; blanco joins it.
• Under-icing. Half a glass of ice melts faster than a full one and dilutes more, not less.

If it does go wrong

Too bitter: add a few more grains of salt before you add anything sweet, because the bitterness is usually a perception problem rather than a balance one. Too sweet or flabby: more lime, and consider a drier soda such as Fresca or Squirt in place of Jarritos. Too sharp: a bar spoon of agave syrup, added before the soda so it can be stirred in. Flat: it was stirred, or the soda was open too long — there is no recovery, start again. Tastes weak but hits hard: that is the drink working as designed, which is worth saying out loud to whoever is drinking a second one.

Making it ahead

Mix tequila, lime juice and salt in a bottle or jug and keep it in the fridge — it holds a day without losing much. Pour 75ml of that base over ice per glass and top with soda to order. Never batch the soda in.

Keeping it

It does not keep. Carbonation is the whole texture of the drink and it is gone within the hour.

Reheating

Not applicable.

Freezing

Not applicable to the finished drink, but two freezer tricks matter: freeze the glass, and freeze grapefruit soda into ice cubes so that as they melt they top the drink up rather than watering it down.

Leftovers

There are none, but the tequila-lime-salt base can be mixed ahead in a jug and kept cold. Only the soda has to go in per glass.

Scaling it

Scales cleanly for any number of people as long as the soda goes in per glass rather than into the jug. For a party, a jug of the base, a bucket of ice and cold bottles of soda on the side lets people build their own and keeps every drink lively.

Substitutions

Fresh grapefruit juice with soda water and a little agave syrup or sugar syrup in place of the soda gives a drier, more bitter, more adult drink — closer to what a cocktail bar serves and further from what a cantina serves. The sodas are not interchangeable: Jarritos Toronja is the sweetest and most fruit-forward and is the usual Mexican choice, Squirt is drier and more astringent, Fresca is the driest of the three and is often chosen deliberately to cut the sugar. Reposado tequila works but the oak fights the grapefruit rather than joining it; mezcal turns the drink smoky and makes it a different, heavier proposition.

Dietary swaps

A Virgin Paloma — grapefruit soda, lime, salt and ice, with the tequila left out — is a real thing rather than a modern invention, and appears in Grady Spears and Brigit Binns's Cowboy Cocktails (2000) with the tequila listed as optional. For less sugar, use fresh grapefruit juice topped with soda water, or Fresca. The drink is already vegan, dairy-free and nut-free, and 100 per cent agave tequila is gluten-free.

Shopping for it

Look for the words '100% de agave' on the tequila label; anything that does not say it is a mixto, made with up to 49 per cent other sugars. Grapefruit soda from a Mexican or Latin grocer is usually cane-sugar sweetened and tastes noticeably cleaner than the corn-syrup versions. Pink grapefruit soda gives the colour people expect, white grapefruit soda a drier drink.

Keeping the cost down

Buy the mid-range 100 per cent agave blanco rather than the expensive one — anything with age statements or heavy oak is wasted here, and the cheapest mixto tequilas bring a solvent note that no amount of grapefruit will bury. The soda is the cheap ingredient and swapping it is the cheapest way to change the drink.

Sustainability

Blue Weber agave takes six to eight years to reach maturity and is harvested once, which makes tequila one of the slowest agricultural products in any bar and its supply prone to boom and shortage. Buying 100 per cent agave supports the growers rather than the sugar suppliers. Grapefruit soda is a heavy, watery thing to ship; the local brand is almost always the better choice.

Nutrition

Roughly 190 kcal and about 13-14g of sugar per drink, almost all of it from the soda, though this varies by soda brand and is an estimate rather than a measured figure. The alcohol is the significant number: 60ml of 40 per cent tequila is about 2.4 UK units, or a little over one and a third US standard drinks, which is more than most people assume from a glass that tastes this light.

Worth it?

The most useful drink in the collection. It takes five minutes, needs no equipment, forgives inexact measuring, and is drier and more interesting than the drink everyone orders instead of it. The salt is the whole trick and it costs nothing.

Where it comes from

Origin

Mexico, almost certainly, and most likely somewhere between Jalisco and the northern border, in the second half of the 1950s at the earliest. No town, bar or person can honestly be named. Camper English's reading of the evidence is that it may even be a Mexican-American invention rather than a Mexican one, since some of the earliest traceable references are from the United States.

Also called

Paloma, or la paloma.

Said out loud

pah-LOH-mah, with the stress on the middle syllable and a soft, short first vowel.

What the name means

Paloma is Spanish for 'dove', which is the usual explanation and the one everyone repeats. There is a competing suggestion that it is a corruption of 'pomelo', Spanish for grapefruit, which is at least as plausible and equally unproven. Neither can be confirmed, and any link to the folk song La Paloma is speculation that has hardened through repetition rather than evidence.

History

The Paloma belongs to the period when tequila stopped being a regional spirit and became a national one, and when American soft drinks arrived in Mexico in volume. Squirt reached the Mexican market in 1955 and its own marketing later claimed the tequila mix had become popular in the early 1950s, which cannot be true of a soda that was not yet sold there — a good illustration of how little of this story survives checking. Recipes for tequila with grapefruit soda appear in Mexican magazines through the 1960s, but under no fixed name, and the name itself does not settle into print until decades after the drink was being poured.

Why it matters

It is an everyday drink rather than an occasion drink, sometimes called the working man's drink, and it is the ordinary Mexican answer to a hot afternoon in a way the margarita — a bar cocktail with a technique and an export career — is not. It has been an IBA official cocktail for some years, which put a fixed spec on something that had never had one. It is worth noting that the repeated claim that the Paloma outsells the margarita in Mexico is plausible and universally asserted but not something anyone appears to have backed with a sales figure, so it is safer to say that Mexicans drink it far more often than foreigners think, rather than to quote a ranking.

When it is eaten

Afternoons rather than evenings. Barbecues, taquerias, cantinas, football on a television in the corner, the first drink of a long hot day. It is not a celebration drink and it does not want to be one.

The traditional way

Built in the glass, never shaken, never blended, and never stirred hard once the soda is in. The most traditional version of all has two ingredients — tequila and grapefruit soda — and is poured by eye straight into a tall glass over ice.

How it changed

The bar world has spent the last fifteen years taking the soda out and putting fresh grapefruit juice, soda water and a measured sweetener in its place, which produces a better-balanced and considerably drier drink and loses some of the point. Salt has moved from the rim into the liquid in the IBA specification. Mezcal and chilli have been added by bars everywhere. The one constant is the ratio of roughly one part tequila to two parts grapefruit.

Regional variations

The cantarito, associated with Jalisco, is the Paloma's country cousin: tequila with grapefruit, orange and lime juices and a salted rim, served in a small unglazed clay cup, which keeps it cold and adds a wet-earth aroma of its own. A chamoy or Tajin rim in place of plain salt is common across Mexico. Elsewhere the drink is essentially the Greyhound with tequila in place of vodka or gin.

How this version differs

The IBA specification is 50ml tequila, 5ml lime, a pinch of salt and 100ml pink grapefruit soda. Ours pours 60ml of tequila and a full 15ml of lime — three times the citrus — which makes a drier, sharper, more assertive drink than the official one, and needs the salt more as a result. We also keep the optional salt rim, which the IBA leaves out.

Sources and credit

No inventor can be credited. The two names most often attached to it — Don Javier Delgado Corona of La Capilla in Tequila, and Feliciano Cervantes of Cantina La Piedad in San Luis Potosi — are both unsupported, and Don Javier explicitly denied it in his lifetime. The 1953 pamphlet cited across the internet does not exist and was traced to a Wikipedia hoax.

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