How to Make Fresh Squeezed Homemade Lemonade

Hi, I'm Aimee. This is House of Nash Eats, and today we're making fresh-squeezed homemade lemonade. To start out making our fresh, home-squeezed lemonade, we're going to make a simple syrup. And all you have to do to make a simple syrup is add two cups of granulated sugar into a small saucepan, and then we're going to add two cups of water. And we'll turn that on. Okay, and what we're going to do is stir this together. And after about six to eight minutes, it doesn't even need to come to a boil. It's just going to heat up enough that it will go from being cloudy, like it is right now, to a clear, slightly pale yellow sort of liquid that's a simple syrup. And it's just dissolving the sugar, and it's going to make it so that you don't get grainy little bits of sugar in your fresh-squeezed lemonade. Nobody wants that. Okay, while our simple syrup is being made, we're going to go ahead and start working on juicing our lemons. So I've got a whole bunch of lemons here. It's going to take like three to four pounds, usually, of lemons to get two cups of fresh-squeezed lemon juice. So you can buy one of those big bags at Costco. If you're really lucky, you have a friend who has a lemon tree, and they'll share lemons with you. So first, I'm going to take my lemons, and I'm going to roll them on the counter while pressing down with my hand. The reason we're going to do this is because it breaks up the pulp inside the lemon and makes it so more juice comes out. So I'm going to do that with each of my lemons so that they're even juicier and easier to squeeze out the juice. Maybe I should have done that on my cutting board. We don't have to put that in, I don't know. Made my counter yellow. It's fine. Now I'm going to cut all of these lemons in half, and we're going to juice each of the lemons. And you can use any kind of lemon juicer you want. You don't even have to use a juicer. You could squeeze these by hand. But that's a little bit of work, and a juicer certainly makes it a lot easier to juice your lemons. So you can use the kind where you press it down. I have this one that you just run them around, and it works great. This is my favorite one of all the different juicers I have tried. And just squeeze it out so that lemon is empty, and this will catch all of the seeds and most of the pulp. But the reason I really like this one is I like a little bit of lemon pulp in my lemon juice, or in my lemonade. I like that little bit of texture that it gives. And so I leave it in. If you really don't want any pulp in your lemonade, you could strain this through a fine mesh strainer before making your lemonade and adding the simple syrup. And that will get rid of all of the pulp for you. Actually, I'm gonna check on this. I can see that this has gone from cloudy to clear. So I'm just gonna turn that off. And if you stir it, you can see that this is a nice, clear, simple syrup. It doesn't really thicken up or anything. It just makes a nice, clear liquid and dissolves all of that sugar into the water. And so we could make our lemonade right now, but I'm going to let it cool down for a little bit first, rather than adding the hot syrup to our lemon juice and a bunch of ice. I'm gonna cool this down for a little while before we make our lemonade. Okay, so I'm going to transfer my lemon juice to a measuring cup to make sure I've got two full cups. Not there yet. So I'm gonna get rid of all those seeds and the larger bits of pulp and keep squeezing. This is a really good job to have your kids do for you. They love it and you don't have to do the work. All right, so we've got our simple syrup done and I've got two cups of freshly squeezed lemon juice here. You could use bottled lemon juice, but it won't have the same quality and flavor that actual fresh lemon juice is going to have. So I'm going to actually use a couple of extra lemons and slice them up to add to my pitcher, just to have a really beautiful, fun presentation. You could also make wedges or smaller pieces to add to your glasses if you wanna serve your lemonade that way as well. One thing to watch out for if you're adding lemon slices to your pitcher is if your lemons have a lot of seeds and they're loose, they could fall out in the pitcher and get poured into a glass and that's not so fun. So just pop those little seeds out before you add them to the pitcher. Now I'm just going to add my lemon slices to the bottom of the pitcher that I'm going to serve my lemonade from. And I'm going to fill it up with a bunch of ice. Now I'm going to add what is essentially lemonade concentrate, which is just my freshly squeezed lemon juice and my simple syrup, which I took and I poured into a jar so that I could stick it in the fridge and chill it. I like to do this often because you can make this a week or two weeks in advance and it's going to be just fine in the fridge. And it's just one less thing to do when you're serving lemonade for a party. I'm going to add all of my simple syrup. So right now that's pretty concentrated lemonade, which is perfect because you can dilute it out as much as you want till you get your lemonade just how you like it. So I've got some water here and I'm just going to fill it up with water until I have it just how I like it. So I'm going to give it a stir. Okay, so now I get to test my fresh, squeezed homemade lemonade and I can't wait. Oh, it's so, so good. I love that you can balance how tart or sweet you like your lemonade by adding more or less of the syrup or more or less lemon juice. But this is exactly how I like it. It's so cold and sweet and refreshing. You guys, thanks so much for watching my videos and subscribing to House of Nash Eats. We just hit 1000 subscribers and I wanted to celebrate with this great homemade lemonade recipe. Be sure to like and subscribe to my channel for more recipes just like this.