Spicy Cucumber-Jalapeño Limeade

Looking back from today, it's hard to remember that spicy margaritas were not always a thing. The idea seems so obvious, so inevitable, so timeless. And yet you'd have been hard-pressed to find one on a cocktail menu before the year 2000. Point is, if you like either the spicy margarita or its close cousin, the cucumber margarita, this is the nonalcoholic drink for you. And I'd wager that this one has just as much potential to become a mainstay of refreshing hot-weather drinks for years to come.

It should be easy to envision this drink, but in case anyone is struggling: Imagine the flavor of bracingly tart lime balanced with just enough sugar to make it sing, infused with the sting of fresh jalapeños and offset by the cooling breeze of fresh cucumber. The green-on-green-on-green theme isn't an accident here—all three of these ingredients bring a verdant freshness to the glass, even as they playfully spar with your taste buds. It's like jumping into a cold pool on a very hot day.

Getting the Most Flavor Into the Glass

The key to building bold flavors is all about doing infusions the right way. For this limeade, I run two infusions side by side. The first is soaking thinly sliced cucumber in freshly squeezed lime juice, which is more than enough to draw the cucumber's flavor and water out.

While that's happening, I use a technique that is built on a cocktail ingredient called oleo-saccharum. Trus oleo-saccharum is made by muddling and then macerating citrus peel (usually lemon, but it can be lime as it is here) with sugar. The muddling and sugar together draw out the natural, deeply flavorful oils from the citrus peel; then, as the water in the peel is extracted, an emulsified syrup forms that blends the oil, sugar, and water together. It's a potent ingredient that allows you to get all that great flavor from the rind without all the acidity of the juice tied to it.

My twist is to add the minced jalapeños to this oleo-saccharum mixture as it's forming, the logic being that much of the flavor and the spice-delivering capsaicin of the chiles is fat-soluble and the oils from the zest provide that fat. The result is a more potent and complex dose of the chile in each sip.

Once the syrup has formed, all you have to do is blend in the cucumber-lime juice and some water and then strain out the solids to produce a concentrated limeade syrup that can then be mixed with ice and further diluted to taste for serving.

Dialing in the Jalapeño Heat

The recipe below calls for one or two jalapeños. My preference is two, for a limeade that really has some punch, but feel free to reduce the amount for a more gentle heat (or increase it if you really want to sweat). Of course jalapeños can vary in intensity, so I recommend tasting the syrup as it's forming. If you decide it's not hot enough, you can always add more minced chile and allow the syrup to macerate even longer to draw that heat out.