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Lemonade recipe
Jul. 4th, 2010 05:32 pmOkay, there are several lemonade recipes online, and they're all very similar. Mine is better. Trust me.
Okay, you don't have to trust me. You can do a side-by-side taste test if you really want to. Mine will win.
The secret to a good lemonade is in the simple syrup. If you just put in lemon juice and water and sugar, the sugar won't dissolve properly and it will be alternately too tart and too sweet. A simple syrup is one part water to one part sugar, more or less - I use a little less sugar than that - heated until the sugar has dissolved.
The real secret, though, is that the simple syrup can be a tad more complex. For every two lemons you juice, get the zest from one and add the zest to the syrup before you heat it up. The zest in the syrup should be strained out before you add the lemon juice (and eaten, because it's just been boiled in sugar water and it's now lightly candied.)
So, the complete recipe:
2 cups juice - I use a mixture of lemon and lime, about a 3:1 ratio of lemon to lime, mostly fresh-squeezed, topped up with bottled juice
2 cups water
1 1/2 cups sugar, more or less
Zest from two lemons and three limes
Put the zest, water, and sugar in a saucepan. Set aside the juice for now, preferably in a big bowl. Heat the syrup mixture until it's clear and you can't see any granules of sugar on a spoon. Then heat it a bit more; not quite to boiling but certainly to simmering. Now pour it through a strainer into the bowl of juice and stir. Put it into jars - there will be nearly six cups of the stuff, and two cups makes two litres of lemonade, so I use two-cup Mason jars for this step. You can use any container that can go in the fridge, really; you can't seal the jars properly because if you cook the lemon juice, it will go bitter, and that's no good at all, so you have to refrigerate it. It will last a while in the fridge though - longer than it will take you to drink it.
When you want to make it up, it's a ratio of one part mix to three or four parts water; so, one cup of mix to three cups of water gives you one litre of lemon/limeade.
It's really really good, mixes well with a variety of types of alcohol (the cherry brandy was really nice, and I suspect anything with grenadine would be divine) and relatively simple. If you are willing to use mostly bottled juice, you don't need to juice many lemons, which is far and away the hardest part.
Okay, you don't have to trust me. You can do a side-by-side taste test if you really want to. Mine will win.
The secret to a good lemonade is in the simple syrup. If you just put in lemon juice and water and sugar, the sugar won't dissolve properly and it will be alternately too tart and too sweet. A simple syrup is one part water to one part sugar, more or less - I use a little less sugar than that - heated until the sugar has dissolved.
The real secret, though, is that the simple syrup can be a tad more complex. For every two lemons you juice, get the zest from one and add the zest to the syrup before you heat it up. The zest in the syrup should be strained out before you add the lemon juice (and eaten, because it's just been boiled in sugar water and it's now lightly candied.)
So, the complete recipe:
2 cups juice - I use a mixture of lemon and lime, about a 3:1 ratio of lemon to lime, mostly fresh-squeezed, topped up with bottled juice
2 cups water
1 1/2 cups sugar, more or less
Zest from two lemons and three limes
Put the zest, water, and sugar in a saucepan. Set aside the juice for now, preferably in a big bowl. Heat the syrup mixture until it's clear and you can't see any granules of sugar on a spoon. Then heat it a bit more; not quite to boiling but certainly to simmering. Now pour it through a strainer into the bowl of juice and stir. Put it into jars - there will be nearly six cups of the stuff, and two cups makes two litres of lemonade, so I use two-cup Mason jars for this step. You can use any container that can go in the fridge, really; you can't seal the jars properly because if you cook the lemon juice, it will go bitter, and that's no good at all, so you have to refrigerate it. It will last a while in the fridge though - longer than it will take you to drink it.
When you want to make it up, it's a ratio of one part mix to three or four parts water; so, one cup of mix to three cups of water gives you one litre of lemon/limeade.
It's really really good, mixes well with a variety of types of alcohol (the cherry brandy was really nice, and I suspect anything with grenadine would be divine) and relatively simple. If you are willing to use mostly bottled juice, you don't need to juice many lemons, which is far and away the hardest part.