Why is it that summer and booze go together so well? There’s nothing better than sitting outside on a warm day and sipping on a cool drink: a margarita, mojito, mint julep, or one of my favorites… sangria. Poor winter just doesn’t match up when it comes to seasonal cocktails. Unless you really like eggnog, winter just can’t hold a candle to summer in the alcohol department.
My cousin hosted a cookout for the Fourth of July this past weekend and I offered to bring sangria. After all, any reason is a good excuse to make sangria. I turned to one of my favorite recipes: Bobby Flay’s Red Wine Sangria.
Bobby Flay rarely disappoints, and this cocktail is no different. It’s super easy to make. The hardest part is probably making the simple syrup, but let’s face it: if you can’t handle making simple syrup, what the heck are you doing reading a food blog? Anyway, other than that, this recipe is really just mixing liquids and chopping fruit.
Whenever I make this recipe, I usually just use apples and oranges as the fruit, even though it calls for blackberries and pomegranate seeds. The latter are usually hard to find, and the former are cheaper and soak up the wine really well. After all, isn’t sangria all about the wine-soaked fruit? I’m seriously in love with drunken apples. I’ve been toying with idea of taking all the wine soaked apples from my next sangria and baking them into a pie. I’ll let you know how that turns out.
Bobby’s sangria is really delicious. The brandy adds a nice flavor, with the orange juice and triple sec adding some sweetness. The pomegranate juice adds just the right amount of bite. The cocktail is really well balanced. It’s almost too easy to drink. You definitely have to watch yourself or you will find yourself half in the bag before you can climb out. There are worse places to find yourself, though.
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Jul 08, 2009 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
This was a delicious sangria, and I’m picky about my sangria! I will say to the author of this post, though, that if he’d rationalize his addiction to Whole Foods and venture out to Trade Joe’s once in a while, he’d find blackberries and pomegranate seeds very easily!
I don’t usually have trouble finding either ingredient at WF, but they tend to be pricey, and I can’t justify spending the money just to throw them in a sangria. Plus, I would get them fresh at WF… I don’t think Trader Joes has much fresh food.
I would happily go to Trader Joe’s if there was one close to me. With WF 2 minutes down the road, it’s hard to get motivated to drive 20-30 minutes to find a TJ.
Yep — both are fresh at TJ’s, and they have more fresh food than you think! They have containers of just the pom seeds so you don’t have to deal with the whole fruit too, which is nice.
Yeah, WF does that too with the pom seeds.
I am really interested in trying this recipe! What red wine do you recommend using?
If you want to be really authentic you can use a spanish red. Because you’re adding so much stuff to it, I wouldn’t recommend using anything real nice. I used Cheap Red Wine… literally, that was the name of the wine on the label. Don’t spend too much on the wine, anything that says “red table wine” is probably fine. I’ve used red truck in the past and it has worked well too.
Good luck, and remember to drink it slowly…