Black Margarita Halloween Drink Recipe

Most black cocktails get their color from activated charcoal, and there are better options. Charcoal is not an approved color additive in the United States, New York City has been ordering it out of food and drink since 2016, and the property that makes it useful in an emergency room is the one that makes it a poor cocktail ingredient: it binds indiscriminately, prescription medication included. Whether the pinch in a single drink is enough to matter is not settled, which is reason enough to reach for something else.

Cuttlefish ink does the same job with none of that. It gets sold as squid ink nearly everywhere, but a cuttlefish is a relative of the squid rather than the same animal, and its ink is the more delicate of the two. Straight from the packet it smells aggressively of the sea, which is alarming until you taste it, because what it actually tastes like is salt. A quarter teaspoon turns a full drink opaque black and leaves behind something closer to a saline dash or a lick of the rim than anything fishy. That is why a margarita is the right home for it. One warning that matters more than the flavor does: cuttlefish ink is shellfish, so this is not a drink to hand to someone with a shellfish allergy.

Underneath the color this is a straight margarita, which puts it in the daisy family, where the orange liqueur does the sweetening rather than syrup alone. It is also the color of a bat, which fits better than it sounds, since wild agave is pollinated by bats. The rim is a blend of red Hawaiian sea salt and black lava salt, which gives a two-tone edge that neither salt manages on its own. For the rest of the Halloween menu, the blood bag margarita takes the opposite approach with blood orange, and the spicy blood orange margarita adds chili heat to the same fruit. It also anchors our Halloween cocktail roundup, which has all eight of this season's drinks in one place.