Bloody Mary
Updated Oct. 20, 2025
- Total Time
- 10 minutes
- Prep Time
- 5 minutes
- Cook Time
- 5 minutes
- Rating
- Comments
- Read comments
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Ingredients
- Ice
- 2ounces vodka or gin
- ½ to ¾ounce fresh lemon juice, to taste
- 3 to 5heavy dashes Worcestershire sauce, to taste
- 1½ to 2teaspoons prepared hot horseradish, to taste
- 4dashes hot sauce (such as Tabasco)
- 2dashes celery salt
- Fresh coarsely ground black pepper
- Splash of olive brine or pickle brine
- Tomato juice (such as Sacramento)
- Large pitted green olive (such as Gordal Queen), lemon wedge and lime wedge, to garnish
- Pickled onion and celery stalk (both optional), to garnish, see Tip
Preparation
- Step 1
Fill a pint glass with ice to the top. Add vodka, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, horseradish, hot sauce, celery salt, pepper and olive brine. Top off with tomato juice.
- Step 2
Pour into a shaker, shake to mix then pour it all back into the pint glass. (You could also roll the shaker back and forth between your hands for a more gentle incorporation of flavors.) Garnish with an olive, lemon and lime wedges, and, if desired, pickled onion and celery.
- Adam Estes suggests pickling your own onions, which is especially easy if you can find already peeled fresh pearl onions. Make a simple brine of salt, sugar, vinegar and water, bring it to a boil and pour over the onions in a clean glass jar. Close the jar, refrigerate and let pickle for 2 to 3 days, or more, tasting the onions occasionally until they’re pickled to your liking.
Private Notes
Comments
V-8 in place of tomato juice and lots of lime rather than lemon juice elevate the Bloody Mary to cosmic heights! And my secret ingredient is Aalborg Akvavit which tastes faintly of caraway. You can make a reasonable substitute by incubating some plain vodka with plenty of caraway seeds for several days.
Count me as a definite fan of this concoction, but you really have to be careful with it when using pre-made mixes. Some of whom have about three days worth of sodium in one serving. I still recall a convention I attended in Reno, where I departed semi-early on a Saturday. The hotel lobby had a bloody mary cart set up. You paid for the glass with the gin/vodka, then the cart had all kinds of condiments to either embellish, or ruin, the drink however you wished. Airport trans proved nice.
Nothing, and I mean nothing makes a Bloody better than grating fresh horseradish on the top. It's astonishing.
Since I opened my restaurant BIX in 1988 in San Francisco, we have always served our Bloody Mary shaken, strained and served up. Cuts down on the dilution from the ice. The secret is to use only tomato juice made from whole tomatoes-NOT CONCENTRATE-which helps add a glycerin quality which completes the drink. Recipe: Juice of 1/2 lemon, vodka, tomato juice, scant grind of pepper and dash of Worcestershire. Garnish with 1/2 half lemon peel. No other gimmicks; it's not a salad.
A Bloody Mary is good but a Bloody Caesar is great! Swap out the tomato juice for Clamato juice and you have a Canadian classic. Canadians are such fans that there are all inclusive resorts in the Caribbean that carry Clamato juice just for us.
I use 1 full oz of fresh lemon juice. And I use Knudsen bottled organic tomato juice. And Sriracha instead of Tabasco. Otherwise it’s the same as my recipe- and I get compliments on my bloody Mary’s all the time.