Making My Own Lemonade Recipe

It appears to be November already, my Fedi timeline is full of people talking about how this is the month to do some writing if you are so inclined. I happen to have a blog, so I might just be the target audience of those calls to write more. Last weekend I also happened to spend some time to work on my own recipe for lemonade syrup, so I thought it might be nice to make a little blog post about how I go about such a project.

This particular recipe started because the lemonade syrup sold at the grocery store has changed its recipe, making it noticably worse. I used to like a particular brand of syrup, but they stopped selling the syrup in favour of only selling the mixed lemonade, and only to businesses such as restaurants. This made it inaccessible to me, so I got a bottle of every other syrup the local grocery stores sell, and found myself a relatively cheap brand that came remarkably close to the brand I used to get.

Last month, however, that cheap brand of acceptable syrup stopped selling a regular syrup and became available as a sugar free option. As I didn’t like their updated flavour, and no existing brand was actually good enough for my standards, there was only one option left: Learn how to make it myself.

So I set out to do just that. I went to the market and got myself some strawberries, as that’s the flavour I like. I already knew how to make a simple syrup, so I took that as a starting point. Its all syrup, so surely it’s just as simple as adding some fruit to that to get started.

Fruit isn’t liquid by its own, so it needs a little help. After cooking the fruit for around 30 minutes in a simple syrup, I used a stick blender to blend it to become a lot smoother. It still retained some small bits that the stick blender couldn’t smooth out, so I took a sieve and strained the entire mixture. The result looked decent enough, a bit darker and a bit thicker than the usual syrup I would buy, but it is a start.

After tasting the first attempt, I found that it needed more sugar. The best way to try adn imitate an existing product is to use similar ingredients and similar quanitites. Sadly, ingredient lists in my country don’t list the amounts of every ingredient used, but it does list them in order of quantity, and it does list the exact amount of sugar. Two things stood out to me, the main ingredient was apple juice, and it contained more sugar than I was using so far.

With this new insight, I got myself a bottle of apple juice from the grocery store, and added an equal amount of it to the pot I was using to make the syrup. This did make it taste a lot closer to the syrup I was trying to imitate, but I found it still lacked some sweetness. Easy to fix, just head up the syrup, add more sugar, and let it dissolve.

Another taste, and I’m getting very close. I’d say it was a bit sweeter than the syrup I was going for, but not by much. But because I’m making it with fresh ingredients, and no huge list of preservatives, I had to add something extra to make sure it doesn’t spoil within a week anyway. Generally, when I make a liquid and want to make sure it doesn’t spoil quickly, I add some alcohol, which would probably work here as well. However, adding alcohol might make it less suitable for other people that occasionally visit me. Something sour would work fine as well, and I just so happen to have lemon juice.

Because I was not sure if this would mix well with what I had already, I decided to try this out with a little bit of syrup first. I measured out 50mL and added 5mL of lemon juice first. This was way to much for my humble taste buds, so I was happy I didn’t ruin the entire batch. On the second try, I added half, going for 2.5mL of lemon juice, and this much better already. Still a bit too sour for me, but I’m getting real close. With some more trial and error, I decided to go for a 2% lemon juice content. This is much easier to do by weight, so I weighed the mixture I had and added 2% of that as lemon juice.

Finally, I had something that was near perfect for what I was going for. The syrup itself also had a very good color and consistency, compared to the syrup I was trying to recreate. The flavour was perhaps even better than what I was hoping for.

As I was experimenting with the goal to make a recipe out of it, I kept notes of the quantities I used of everything, what I did with each of them, and with notes on what I liked and could improve. As such, making a recipe out of it was fairly simple. While I was specifically targetting strawberry flavour, I might try to use it with different fruits in the future too, but first I will enjoy the syrup I made so far.

All in all, I’d say it was a very good weekend!