Giada De Laurentiis' Trick To Chill Cocktails Without Watering Them Down
A cocktail can be a refreshing treat on a hot day, but the second it starts to get tepid, it's a lot harder to enjoy. Frozen margaritas are always a great idea, but if you want a different type of chilled cocktail, adding ice cubes is usually the best option. While effective at keeping your drink cold, they can quickly water it down.
Ice cubes melting is an unavoidable occurrence, especially on warmer days. But there's a way to prevent them from diluting the flavor of your drink.
According to Giada De Laurentiis, the trick is to freeze the drink itself into ice cubes. In her recipe for a limoncello Arnold Palmer shared on Instagram, the celebrity chef prepares a pitcher of lemon zest, iced tea, sparkling lemonade, and limoncello, which she then pours entirely into an ice cube tray. Once frozen, De Laurentiis adds the flavored ice to a glass, and tops it off with plain iced tea. Because there's no extra water added through the ice, it can chill any cocktail without diluting it.
Giada De Laurentiis has a specific hack for bottled drinks
If you don't want to bother preparing flavored ice cubes, or you just don't have enough time to do so, Giada De Laurentiis has an alternative trick that she originally came up with for chilling bottled wine (via Giadzy). Though you can technically turn wine into ice cubes, Food & Wine explains that it won't freeze completely solid, nor will it taste exactly the same. Therefore the ice cube trick De Laurentiis uses with her Arnold Palmers doesn't work as well with wine.
Instead of chilling each individual glass of wine with ice, De Laurentiis chills the whole bottle. First she soaks a towel with water, wraps it around the bottle, and places it in the freezer. She then lets it sit there for 10 minutes. As she explained in the blog post, the wet towel attracts the cold and flash chills the drink from the outside in, so this can work with any bottled beverage.
No matter what alcoholic beverage you're drinking, there's a way to keep it cold without watering it down.