Bloody Mary
Updated Oct. 19, 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.
Nothing, and I mean nothing makes a Bloody better than grating fresh horseradish on the top. It's astonishing.
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.
This is a good one. But I use lime instead of lemon, 3 tsp of horseradish, and salt on the rim. SO glad you wrote gin.
Zing Zang mix, then dress it up.
I think some of the commenters here would like Lu's Bloody Mary better (in NYT Cooking). As for me, I like them thin and strong - lots of vodka, fresh lemon and lime, V8 and Clamato, and kick from the fresh herb, celery salt, and cayenne dipped glass rim.