How to muddle mint and fruit

Mint's aroma is in oil glands on the leaf surface. Press the leaf and those glands rupture and the oil goes into the drink, which is the whole objective. Keep going and you break the leaf structure itself, releasing chlorophyll and the vegetal compounds behind it - and those taste green, bitter and faintly like cut grass.

That is why the test for mint is smell, not appearance. A properly muddled mint drink has leaves that still look like leaves and a glass you can smell from arm's length. A badly muddled one has dark, shredded flecks and a flat herbal bitterness that no amount of sugar hides.

Fruit works on the opposite logic. Juice and peel oil take real force to release, and there is no damage you can do to a lime wheel by pressing it hard - only by pressing it often, which drags the white pith into the liquid. Heavy and few beats light and many.

1. Use whole leaves, not a sprig. Strip the leaves off the stem. Stems are bitter and they do not carry aroma, so muddling them is pure downside.
2. Clap the leaves first. Put them in your palm and slap them once with the other hand. That alone ruptures a surprising amount of the surface oil before any muddler touches them, and it means you need fewer presses afterward.
3. Lay them flat in the bottom of the glass. A heap of leaves muddles unevenly - the ones underneath get destroyed and the ones on top get nothing.
4. Add the sugar or syrup first, not the spirit. Granulated sugar gives the leaves something slightly abrasive to work against, which gets more oil out at lower pressure. Add the spirit after.
5. Press straight down, four to six times, with a quarter turn. Weight through the muddler, not a twisting grind. Straight down and a small rotation.
6. Stop when you can smell it. That is the finish line. If the leaves have gone dark and ragged you have gone past it.

If a mojito still comes out bitter after all of that, the usual remaining culprit is the mint itself - old supermarket mint that has been refrigerated for a week has lost most of its surface oil, so people compensate by muddling harder and get bitterness instead of aroma.

Here you want force and few repetitions, and you want to think about what part of the fruit is in the glass.

• Lime and lemon wheels: three or four heavy presses, no twisting. Press the flesh side, not the peel side, if you can see which is which.
• Orange slices for an old fashioned: one or two presses with a sugar cube and a dash of bitters, then stop. The traditional fruit-salad old fashioned is a muddled drink, but the modern version barely muddles at all.
• Berries: two or three light presses. They need almost nothing and they go to pulp instantly, which then clogs your strainer. Best cocktail strainers covers the double-straining habit that fixes it.
• Cucumber: press, do not grind. Cucumber skin turns bitter with abuse exactly the way mint does.

A general rule that has saved a lot of drinks: whatever you are muddling, if you find yourself pressing more than about six times, the tool is wrong for the ingredient rather than your arm being insufficient.

In rough order of how well each one works:

1. The handle end of a wooden spoon. The closest substitute there is. Wood, roughly the right diameter, and the flat end of the handle is about as wide as a muddler face. Check it is actually flat and not tapered to a point.
2. A rolling pin end. Works, and the mass helps with fruit. Awkward in anything narrower than a rocks glass.
3. The back of a bar spoon. Fine for pressing a sugar cube and a dash of bitters, which is most of what an old fashioned needs. Useless on mint - the bowl is too small to press a leaf flat.
4. Your hand, for mint only. Clapping the leaves between your palms genuinely gets a lot of the surface oil out. For a mojito in a pinch, clapped mint plus a hard stir is closer to the real thing than badly ground mint is.

What not to use: a pestle, which grinds by design and will shred herbs; a fork, which punctures leaves rather than pressing them; and anything metal in thin glassware, which is how a rocks glass gets a chipped base. If you are ready to buy the right tool, best muddlers covers the three that matter.

Two practical points that decide whether the muddling was worth doing.

First, build in the glass you muddled in wherever you can. Transferring a muddled base leaves oil and pulp behind on the walls of the tin - which is most of what you just worked for. A mojito is built in the glass for that reason, not for theatre.

Second, if the drink is shaken rather than built, muddle in the tin and then double strain it. A Hawthorne spring will let mint flecks and berry pulp straight through, and the texture difference between a single-strained and a double-strained shaken drink is larger than most people expect. Hawthorne vs julep strainer explains which strainer belongs on which vessel, and how to shake a cocktail covers the shake itself.

Finally: muddled drinks are nearly always served over crushed or cracked ice rather than one large cube, because the dilution is part of the design. How to make crushed ice covers getting that right with a bag and a mallet.