Homemade Lemonade Concentrate
Lemonade will always be a favorite summertime drink for me. I make it plain or sometimes with berries added. I like the convenience of those frozen lemonade concentrates but I prefer using fresh squeezed lemon juice. I started making my own concentrate a few years ago when I got a whole case of lemons from a friend. I juiced the lemons and froze much of the juice just plain. There was still a lot of juice. I decided I might as well try to make some lemonade concentrate, too. I went to the store and read the ingredients on several brands of frozen lemonade concentrate. High fructose corn syrup and concentrated lemon juice. Well I decided that wasn’t going to work for me so I did something radical. I stirred some sugar together with lemon juice until the sugar dissolved. There didn’t seem to be much point in adding water- that would defeat the purpose of it being a concentrate. Then I just froze the juice/sugar mixture.
Sometimes I freeze a whole batch together either in a plastic container or in a Ziploc bag. I also froze some of this lemonade mix in ice cube trays. That way once frozen I could pop the cubes into bags and just take out what I needed at the time. I’ll often add some lemon zest, too. Don’t toss all that zest, either. If you are going to be juicing a lot of lemon just for the juice, zest them first- and freeze or dry the zest for later use.
Well here is the recipe for my lemonade concentrate.
Homemade Lemonade Concentrate
1 1/3 c. lemon juice- fresh or bottled
1 c. sugar*
lemon zest, optional
Combine ingredients and stir until sugar is dissolved. Freeze until ready to use. Makes a little over 1 1/2 cups. To use: combine three parts water to one part concentrate.
* You can use honey instead of sugar- but only use 1/2 c. honey as it is much sweeter than sugar.
