Saturday, September 3, 2011

Labor Day Limeaide

I know, I know. It's frigging limeaide, how hard is that to do? Well, judging how how terrible some of the stuff I've swilled down over the years, very.

In all seriousness, there is this particular ratio in limeaide and lemonaide that if you get just a little bit off, it tastes wrong. It's too watery, too sweet, too sour, whatever. So, today being Saturday of the Unofficial Last Weekend Of The Summer, I went food shopping, and lemons and limes were on sale. I always promise myself that I'm going to make limeaide, but as tonight is gaming night, I thought it would be a really nice treat to have some icy cold, handmade limeaide on hand.

Oh yea- commercial stuff always sucks. Something about simple syrup tastes weird to my tongue. And commercial stuff always has the taste of the zest. I like candied orange, lemon and lime peels. But not in my lemon/limeaide.

You need a ~ 2 liter pitcher, preferably one with demarkations on the side. I rolled and squeezed 8 limes, which gave me just a hair under 500 mL. Yes, we're doing this metric. Deal with it. Add three tablespoons white sugar, stir with wooden spoon. It should readily dissolve. Add 1.5 L water so it hits the 2L mark. Taste. I thought it was still a bit too sharp, so I added one more tablespoon sugar. I add the last sugar at the end, because I prefer to be wary of how I flavor the end product. But 0.5 L lime juice, 1.5 L water, 4 tablespoons sugar? Fantastic. It's in the fridge chilling right now.

I'm not going to lie, I'm writing this up here more so that I can refer to it in the future than for you folks.

2 comments:

Barb said...

Thanks for doing the experimental measurements. I love lime & lemonade as well but it's always made on a hit or miss basis. I'll use your proportions in future.

Broklynite said...

Mmm, the vote is in that everybody else but me thinks that it's too sour. I like to have a bit of tartness, but I'm not nuts about it like some people. I guess that this is the ratio that I liked, but another tablespoon or two is what other people want (and isn't really objectionable to me either, really). I wrote this on a particularly hot and miserable day, so what I wanted was the refreshing, palate cleansing tart of the limes more than sweetness, so my opinion might be a tad off on this one. But as I said, easy enough to fix. I guess that the important thing is that it's a good ratio of lime juice to water, and then you can sugar it to taste.