How to Make Homemade Lemonade- 6 Delicious Flavors

Ice cold, refreshing, homemade lemonade is perfect on a hot summer day. And I'm gonna show you how to make it simply six different flavors. All from scratch, super easy, super simple, and super delicious. What is up you guys, it is Carly here, and you're officially cooking with Carly. Today we are talking all things homemade lemonade with some little tricks up my sleeve. We are going to be making flavored lemonades. Not one, not two, we're making six different lemonades today, and it's actually really easy. Like there's nothing crazy that needs to happen, it's super simple and delicious. We're going to start out with our base lemonade recipe, and let me tell you, it rivals that delicious, refreshing lemonade that you can get from that restaurant. It is sweet, it's tangy, it's cold, it's absolutely perfect. I say perfect all the time, but it is. This recipe has the perfect ratio of the tangy lemon juice to the sugar. I've tested it all, got it all figured out, so you don't have to do the testing, that's my job. The only things we need for our base lemonade recipe are lemons, sugar, water, and ice. We're going to start by juicing our lemons. We need a total of two cups of lemon juice. You can do this with like the little hand squeeze juicer things, or if you're really fancy and you have one of those electric ones, you go. This is gonna be really, really fast for you. I have this little contraption where I just juice on the top and the juices go down to the bottom. I'm going to get juicing. One little tip for you on how to get the most juice out of your lemons is to roll them like this, get them nice and soft, whoa, before you start juicing them. My lemon here is all nice and soft. For my juicer, I'll just cut it in half and then squeeze the juice out like this. I've got two cups of lemon juice here, freshly squozen. I've got two cups of lemon juice here. It took about 10 lemons to get to the two cups, and my lemons were pretty small. If you've got large lemons, you'll probably only need about six. Now we're going to whisk together our lemon juice with two cups of granulated sugar. I'm just going to toss it right into here and whisk it together. Two cups of sugar going in here. We're just going to whisk and stir and whisk and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Shouldn't take that long. While I'm stirring this together here, let me tell you about a dream I had. And I was planning on singing Billie Eilish's song right there, but I'm going to spare your ears, just so just imagine it. But two nights ago, I had a dream that I made a video of my lemonade recipe with lots of different variations and everybody loved it and everybody liked it and everybody subscribed to my channel because of it. And long story short, I canceled the three videos we were supposed to shoot today and I'm shooting a lemonade video instead. Our syrup here is done. The consistency is thick. It's not like lemon juice or water or anything. There's definitely some volume to it. And there's no sugar that is settled to the bottom. It's all mixed in nicely. Now we're going to get five cups of cold water and we're going to mix it all together, the syrup here and the cold water. And then we're going to shock it with some ice to get it nice and ice cold. I should mention to you too, if you do not have ice, don't just skip the ice here because the ice will melt and it does turn into water. So your lemonade will be like real flavorful if you just skip out on the ice. If you don't have any ice, make sure you add in at least two cups of water. Here's my five cups of water. And the five cups of water is going to be mixed with our four cups of syrup. Just going to mix, mix, mix. Shouldn't take much to get it all nice and mixed together. I'm going to put two cups of ice in here. And like I said, it will, the ice will melt and it will dilute the lemonade a little bit like we want. Definitely taste it though. This is a strong lemonade. You can always add more water. You can always add more water if that is how you prefer it. Hey, ice is going in and so it doesn't splash everywhere. You can either use a spoon or a whisk like this and make the ice hit that before it goes into the lemonade and then the lemonade won't splash everywhere and make a ginormous mess. You know who taught me that? My dad. Making crystallite growing up. Okay, here's our basic lemonade. And this is actually our first flavor of lemonade is just our classic lemonade. And this is the lemonade we're going to use for all of our flavored lemonades. This lemonade is our base and I'm going to show you how to make homemade fruit syrups to put into your lemonade, mix it all together, add a little bit of fresh fruit in there. It's real good. We are going to be doing strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, cherry, and peach. I remembered them all off the top of my head. Let's talk about making our fruit syrups. They all are made the exact same way. So let's talk about it in general of what we're going to do first and then we'll make them all up and then make ourselves some lemonades. Oh boy. To make our fruit syrups, we need two parts fruit to one part sugar. Okay, so like two cups of fruit, one cup of sugar, one cup of fruit, one half cup of sugar. Yes, are we following? Okay, good. And we're going to put that on the stove top and just let the sugar melt and liquefy and let our fruit sweat and get all soft and we'll stir it and whisk it together and then we'll thin it with water. Just adding like a tablespoon at a time until it gets to the consistency that you like. Think thick pancake syrup. That's what we're wanting. Don't dilute it too much or else it won't flavor your lemonade, right? But that's the basics of it. You can use frozen fruit here too. I've used frozen raspberries before. It works great to use fresh or frozen. If you are using fresh strawberries, something large like this, definitely cut those up. It'll cut down on your cook time, make things a lot faster. And I think that's all I need to tell you. Oh, you're going to want to let these cool down a little bit before you mix in with your lemonade. You just don't want them like boiling, but. Let's get to making our syrups. We're going to add our fruit and sugar into a medium sauce pan on our stovetop over like medium heat. I have my stovetop turned on to about medium heat. I'm just whisking and stirring our fruit. The heat will melt the sugar and make the fruit sweat, letting off a lot of liquid and we're going to get a nice syrup. If you are doing this with a seeded fruit, like raspberries, for instance, you may want to run that through a fine strainer to get the seeds out if you don't want the seeds, but that's totally optional. It's up to you. I'm going to start adding in my water, just a tablespoon at a time here to thin it out a little bit. Okay, I just turned the heat off and I'm going to run this through a fine mesh strainer to get all of those cherry skins out of my syrup. So I've got a nice smooth syrup and I'm going to set this aside, let it chill, before we mix up our lemonade. If you'd rather keep these in, but not so big, you can use like an immersion blender or toss the whole syrup into the blender and blend these up if you want. It should probably take about 10 minutes for you to make your syrup. I have made all five variations here. We've got cherry, raspberry, peach, strawberry, and blackberry. To make your flavored lemonade, all you'll need to do is pour yourself a nice glass of our fresh lemonade and then stir in about a tablespoon of our syrup. And of course, you know, you can always use less, you can always use more, depending on how flavorful you want your lemonade to be. And these syrups will actually keep in your fridge for a week plus. So any unused syrup that you don't use, you can put into an airtight container and toss that into your fridge and be drinking your lemonade multiple times a day for a very long time. Okay, let's interrupt our flavored lemonade talk for just a second because I wanna teach you quickly how to sugar the rim of your glass. It's just so fun and fancy and it tastes so good. Like that little extra sugar when you're drinking, so good. So what I have here is just a simple syrup of water and sugar. It's equal parts water, equal parts sugar. I did a quarter cup of each and then tossed it into my microwave for one minute and it all just dissolves and melts together and creates a syrup. And then just regular granulated sugar here. You'll just dip the rim of your glass into the simple syrup, let it drip off and then dip your rim into the sugar and then just let it sit for, oh, probably five minutes and that sugar will harden onto the edge of your glass. It's just fun and fancy. Okay, back to making our flavored lemonade. I've got my sugar rimmed glass here. First, I'm going to carefully put in some ice. If the ice or wet, anything gets on the sugared rim, it will disappear. So just carefully putting some ice into my cup here and then I'm going to eyeball about a tablespoon worth of the syrup goes in and then the lemonade goes on top. Always toss in some fresh fruit here. Garnish with, you know, a lemon slice, some mint. You can stir up that flavoring from the bottom if you'd like. There you have six different flavors of lemonade for you to make on a hot summer day for you and your family to enjoy. Oh, that's so good. I'm the loudest follower. I'm trying so hard to follow quietly.