Try a Recipe for a Combination Daiquiri-Piña Colada That's Ready to Serve Straight from Your Freezer

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J.M. Hirsch got the idea for his latest book from a snide advertisement. A cocktail aficionado who has written two previous books on mixed drinks, he noticed an ad for gin in a cocktail magazine that jokingly suggested a "freezer door cocktail." He thought it was brilliant.

He made a batched dirty martini by pouring off a bit of the alcohol from a bottle of liquor, then adding the other ingredients plus some water to compensate for the dilution that comes from stirring a cocktail with ice, and storing it in the freezer, ready to be poured at the end of a long hard day – or when you are serving several cocktails at once. The video he made demonstrating his freezer door martini for Christopher Kimball's Milk Street, where he is the editorial director, went viral. 

So he kept experimenting, and now he's releasing a book called Freezer Door Cocktails with recipes for 75 of them – despite swearing to himself that he wouldn't write another cookbook on his own. (That's not including his work on Milk Street cookbooks, like the new Milk Street 365.) 

Despite the simplicity of the concept, freezer door cocktails do require some tinkering, since many ingredients typically found in cocktails will turn into ice in the freezer if their proportion is too great compared to the alcohol, which freezes at a lower temperature than that of the typical freezer. "Obviously a cocktail that freezes like a popsicle is not a successful cocktail," he says with a laugh. 

Hirsch hired two food scientists to help him work out some basic rules, then began figuring out workarounds. He serves some of the freezer door cocktails on ice even if the original cocktail wouldn't be, to add some extra dilution without letting that water crystallize in the freezer. He turns to ingredients such as concentrates, which hold more flavor in less liquid than juice. And he utilizes some techniques from the artisan mixology world, such as fat-washing and speed-infusing liquor. 

"In some ways, those techniques, in terms of practicality, make more sense if you're going to do a whole batch of the cocktail," he says. You're not pulling out the blender to speed-infuse liquor for one drink, or melting fat to rinse a glass for a single serving. 

The coconut-lime daiquiri colada (a sort of combination of a lime daiquiri and a piña colada) recipe below uses both of those techniques, so you can feel like a fancy mixologist while enjoying multiple servings of a summery drink. 

One warm weather drink that Hirsch couldn't crack? The Aperol spritz. "I have several bottles of frozen Aperol," he says ruefully. Aperol popsicle, anyone?

Coconut-Lime Daiquiri Colada

Excerpted from Freezer Door Cocktails by J. M. Hirsch. Copyright © 2024 by J. M. Hirsch. Used with permission of Voracious, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

This snappy little number straddles the line between a Lime Daiquiri and a Piña Colada. We start by speed-infusing white rum with lime zest, producing a liquor that is bright and citrusy without being overwhelmingly acidic. Next, the infused rum is fat-washed with coconut oil, which adds a pronounced but not heavy richness that is the perfect complement to the sweet rum and tangy lime. You will need two squares of cheesecloth.

Ingredients

21 ounces (630 mL) white rum. If starting with a full bottle, pour off 4 ounces (120 mL)
Zest strips from 2 limes
2 ounces (60 mL) coconut oil, melted
2 ounces (60 mL) water
2 ounces (60 mL) agave or simple syrup 
Crushed ice, to serve

Directions

1. In a blender, combine the rum and lime zest. Pulse until finely chopped but not pureed. Let sit for 3 minutes. Strain the rum through a cheesecloth-lined mesh strainer into a liquid measuring cup with at least a 4-cup (1-quart or 1-liter) capacity. Discard the zest. 

2. Stir the melted coconut oil into the rum. Let sit at room temperature for 5 minutes, stirring often. Place in the freezer for 30 minutes. Strain again through a cheesecloth-lined mesh strainer into a 750-milliliter bottle; discard the solids.

3. Add the water and syrup to the bottle. Cap the bottle securely, then shake well to mix. Store in the freezer. To serve, pour into a coupe filled halfway with crushed ice.