When I was growing up, we had a lemon tree in my backyard and my mom used to frequently make lemonade from scratch when lemons were in season. Our tree would overflow with lemons onto the floor in summer. She has moved houses since, but this house has lemons too. I don’t think they have given much fruit off lately though.
I love making homemade lemonade in the summer, whether with extra lemons from a backyard tree or, as it happened recently, after realizing a bought a bag of lemons to use in savory dishes and I forgot to use them.
My mom came up with this lemonade recipe using sparkling water that my sisters and love, especially for get-togethers. If you would like, you can use flat water instead of sparkling, but I like using sparkling when I remember to buy it because it makes the lemonade extra special and refreshing.
Everyone loves lemonade on a hot summer day. This recipe is easy to scale up for parties, but also great in a pitcher in the fridge ready for you and yours. It’s sweet, citrusy and sparkling.
Sparkling Lemonade
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 cup lemon juice
3 to 3 1/2 cups sparkling water
In a small saucepan, combine sugar and water. Bring to a boil, then turn to low, and stir until the sugar dissolves.
Remove seeds from lemon juice and strain juice to get rid of pulp. In pitcher, stir together warm simple syrup, lemon juice, and sparkling water.
Note: For something else new and different, try replacing 1/4 of the lemon juice with lime juice. The last time I made this lemonade, I had to replace just a little of the lemon juice with lime juice because it turns out I didn’t quite have enough lemons, but I still had limes.
My mom usually uses San Pellegrino sparkling water to make this. My favorite water is the Mountain Valley sparkling water. To save you the trouble of measuring or doing math, a bottle of San Pellegrino is 25.3 ounces, which is about 3 1/3 cups. A bottle of Mountain Valley is 33.8 ounces, which is about 4 1/4 cups. I would use one whole bottle of San Pellegrino without measuring for this recipe, but I would measure out the Mountain Valley.
P.S. Have you tried the Japanese iced coffee method or my orange lemon tonic?
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