Lemonade Concentrate

 4 October 2022

Recipe from Cook's Illustrated, July 2021

Lemonade is my beverage of choice for lunch and dinner. I used to drink "Newman's Own" which I could purchase in a 1.8 quart container. Currently I use "Simply Lemonade" which I buy in a 2.7 quart container. Both are good and buying them at the store in a ready-to-drink form is convenient. A fairly recent edition of Cook's Illustrated had an intriguing recipe to make lemonade concentrate which you would mix with water to make lemonade. Would it be good and how convenient would it be?

The zest of two lemons was removed with a vegetable peeler and put into a bowl with sugar and salt. These were mashed together using a potato masher forming a damp, clumpy, fragrant mixture. Hot water was added and stirred to dissolve the sugar and salt. Thus was set aside until cool. Five lemons were juiced to get ¾ cup of juice. (I had to augment the lemons with a little bottled juice to get the desired volume.) The juice was stirred into the cooled zest mixture then strained to remove the zest. The resulting concentrate was refrigerated. It took about 50 minutes to make the concentrate. A few weeks later the concentrate was mixed with water to make a pitcher of lemonade.

The lemonade was good. It had a good balance of sweet and sour and the lemon flavor was not too strong. Despite this I don't expect to be using this recipe on a regular basis. The quality of the beverage made with fresh fruit is better than the bottled lemonades that I drink, but the difference is not enough to justify the investment in time to make the concentrate. I would have hoped that almost an hour's labor would make more than the 1 quart of lemonade that this recipe provides. Nonetheless it was a fun and useful exercise and I don't regret testing it for myself.