Easy Homemade Lemonade

Hey everybody, I'm Rachel Ballard and you're watching Feast and Farm Cooks and I'm so glad to have you here today because it's time for a summer treat. We're making homemade lemonade. You know, there's a million ways you can get your lemonade. You can buy it decently, decently good at the grocery store now, pre-made. But you know, if you don't know my story, my daughter is allergic to artificial food coloring and lemonade, especially pre-packaged things like drink mixes and that sort of thing, are pretty much all artificially colored. So we learned a long time ago that we were going to have to avoid synthetic lemonades and usually the stuff in the two liter bottles is not for us either. So I make ours from scratch a lot of times and it's so easy and so, so good. Let me show you how easy this is to do and I want to see you do it in your own home kitchen. So all you're going to need, water, quite a bit of it, lemon juice, quite a bit of it, sugar and some water that I have simmering over here in this pot. Now it's just coming up to a simmer. We're going to make a simple syrup and the reason we do this is so that the sugar dissolves completely and you don't have anything grainy in the bottom of your lemonade. So quite a bit of sugar going into this pot of simmering water. It takes just a couple of minutes for the sugar to dissolve. So I'm going to stir this and while that's dissolving, we'll talk about lemons just a little bit, but I'm going to get this in and just let it get started. What it will do is right now it's kind of cloudy, but as it simmers it will just instantly dissolve and be perfectly clear. Once you see that the water is perfectly clear, you can turn off the heat and just let it cool down a little bit before you mix up your lemonade. Mine's actually almost there, I'll give it just a second. So this is a time for real lemons, not the squeeze bottles you find in the produce department that have a little lid on there. You need to make sure you're using real lemon juice and ideally fresh lemons. That's what I'm always, always going to recommend for you. Now you can squeeze those by hand if you want to. You're going to be aggravated and frustrated by the time you get there, but this is the juicer that I use. I'm not a big gadget person and so I'll show you how this one works. It's really fun. You just cut your lemons in half. You might have seen these in the store. They actually work by dropping the lemon in. You would think it goes up so that the hole presses it, but it actually goes down and backwards. And so I'll just squeeze it in with my jar here and see if I can do it without making a terrible mess. And so that's all you do and it does a pretty good job. So this is my favorite juicer. I can leave a link to one of these, a similar one on Amazon if you want to pick one up, but it's my absolute, that's my go-to. So into my big pitcher of water and this is completely dissolved, so I'm going to turn this off. See how fast? So fast. I'm going to move things around just a little bit here so that it's easier for me to work. Move that over and move this in. Okay, so all we do is we've got our water. We've got our lemon juice. We're going to pour in most of this. This is the time when I really want you to be confident using your own taste buds and say, you know, I'm gonna, I don't know if I want it quite so sweet. I don't know if I want it quite so tart. So trust yourself. Put part of your juice in. Remember you can put it in, you can't take it out. So put part of it in and I'm going to go ahead and hopefully we're not going to crack this pretty glass jar when I pour this hot syrup in, but I'm going to pour in my simple syrup. Most of it and then I'm going to give it a little quick stir and I'm going to adjust this just until it suits me, until it's sweet enough or tart enough and you can just chill it down, add some lemons to the top and serve it up. It's that simple. I hope you will make this. I hope you'll enjoy this with your family. Make sure to like and share this video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel. To get the full written recipe, you'll find a link below this video in the description box. You can visit that over on the main website and get the recipe. I can't wait to see what you do. I'll see you later. Have a great day. Bye.