Squeezing the most out of this sunny treat
Lemonade is one of a few iconic summer foods that connect us and help us find common ground.
In addition, lemonade has life lessons to teach us:
Lesson #1 – Beauty isn’t even skin-deep
Phil Mastroianni is something of a Lemon Philosopher. His company, Fabrizia Spirits, in Salem, has been producing high-end limoncello for almost 20 years, and he is somewhat enthusiastic on the subject of lemons. According to Mastroianni, when it comes to lemons, what you see is not always what you get.
“The fascinatingly frustrating truth of the matter,” Mastroianni said, “is, no matter how beautiful a lemon looks, you cannot tell how good the essential oils will be inside the rind. The ugliest lemon, with marks and blemishes and scars, can sometimes have as much beautiful lemon oil as a perfectly shaped bright yellow lemon.”
In fact, he said, there are vast differences between different varieties of lemon. In Italy, where his company gets its lemons from, “there’s a different variety of lemon about every 50 miles you drive. There are real peculiar varieties that are popular in Sicily and other parts of Italy. If you happen to live in that town or region, well, why would you buy the other lemons that are 50 miles further away?” In the U.S., by contrast, “you essentially can buy two varieties of lemons, the Eureka lemon and the Lisbon lemon, … Both of those lemons, while they do have good juice, and they’re bright yellow, they do just have a different flavor of what we call in the limoncello industry olio essenziale, which means essential oils in English.”
To make the best lemonade, Mastroianni said, and to get the most lemony flavor, you need to consider the structure of a lemon itself.
“On the inside, you have your flesh of the lemon,” he said, which is where the juice comes from. “Then, working outward, you have the pith of the lemon [the bitter, white part under the skin], which does range. I don’t know why some have more than others. And then you have the outer peel, which is where the essential oils are stored.” The oils, he said, are where most of the lemon flavor comes from. “You’ll get as much flavor by zesting or dicing up finely the lemon zest than if you just were to juice it and get the juice in there.”
Mastroianni suggested that to pick the best lemons for lemonade, shoppers should look at the size of the different lemons.
“If you want lemon that’s less tart,” he said, “the larger the lemon, the less tart the juice is going to be, because there’s just more water watering down the tartness inside that lemon.” He also suggested giving lemons the fruit equivalent of a massage. “This is general knowledge, but if you roll the lemon on your counter, what I’ve seen in practice is a good amount of juice will go to the middle. It sort of loosens up the juice. When you cut the lemon and you put it in your juicer, you’re going to get a lot more juice to come out a little bit easier.”
Lesson #2 – You get out of lemonade what you put into it
Catherine Urbaniak makes her living selling lemonade. She and her husband, Greg, own The Stand “Shaken not Stirred” at the Merrimack Premium Outlets, a full-time stand that only sells lemonade.
“Only lemonade,” she said, “any variation that we can of lemonade. We stick to real fruit, no syrup.”
Urbaniak’s advice for making great lemonade is to use great ingredients.
“I recommend that you don’t skimp on the type of product that you’re using,” she said. “Some people, you know, they don’t want to add all the sugar or they try to modify it in that way. But if you’re trying to make a really good old-fashioned original New England-type lemonade, you have to use all the real ingredients.” Many recipes for lemonade call for using simple syrup as a sweetener, because it mixes easily with the water and lemon juice, but Urbaniak said she thinks that’s a mistake.
“We use sugar,” she said. “If we have our way, it’s extra fine, but it’s actual sugar.”
Choosing the right lemons for lemonade comes with experience, Urbaniak said.
“You can pretty much touch a lemon and know that it’s going to be a good lemon or really tough lemon. For the most part with a touch you can tell a thin-skinned lemon versus a thicker-skinned lemon. And you want a nice good juicy lemon. It’s not going to last long on your counter, but the thinner the skin, the more the juice. It’s not so much the bigger the lemon, because sometimes the bigger the lemon the thicker the skin. If I put down three or four lemons, different variations, and someone picked them all up, they’d be like, ‘That’s the one.’ You just know it when you touch it. But again, you have to touch a ton of lemons to finally be able to see that.” As with dating, she said, you have to squeeze a lot of lemons before you know the right one.
Lesson #3 – Don’t worry
As of September 2021, it has been legal for children under the age of 14 to sell lemonade without a license. House Bill 183, titled “Exempting persons under the age of 14, who are selling soft drinks on family owned or leased property, from city, town, or village district licensing requirements,” was signed by Gov. John Sununu on July 30 of that year.
So your kids can rest easy.
Lesson #4 – A solid foundation is adaptable
According to Megan Barry, of Waterworks Cafe in Manchester, one of the great things about lemonade is how well it lends itself to additional flavors.
“We use fresh squeezed lemon and lime juice,” she said, “with all of our fun flavors, including passionfruit and mango, which are new. If we have an excess of, say, produce or something like that, we’re always trying to make new simple syrups so we can make refreshers and add some sparkling soda to make it, like, a little bubbly. We’re able to be creative with it over here.”
Barry said that lemonade works well with other summertime flavors.
“Watermelon is a big one,” she said, “especially during the summertime. The watermelon has been so fresh. We made our watermelon simple syrup, added fresh squeezed lime juice, as well as our lemonade mix, and then hit it with a little bit of that club soda. It was a big hit among customers as well as employees. We couldn’t stop drinking it. It was so good. The thing is, we can’t buy watermelon syrup. That’s something you have to make.”
“The staff’s favorite is the raspberry,” Barry said. “Mango has been a huge hit. And actually, another one of our most popular is actually made with our lavender syrup. It’s delicious. With lemonade, it’s out of this world.”
Watermelon Simple Syrup, watermelon.org
6 cups seedless watermelon puree (see below)
1½ cups sugar
Choose a ripe, medium-sized watermelon. Look for one with a pronounced pale spot — this shows where the melon rested on the ground when it was growing in the field. If possible, find one with stripes that are two fingers wide.
Cut the melon in half with a large, serrated knife. Scoop out the flesh with an ice cream scoop, and transfer it to your blender. Puree the melon until it is completely liquified. Pour it through a fine mesh strainer.
In a medium saucepan, combine six cups of the juice with the sugar. Cook over low heat, until the sugar is completely dissolved. Reduce the heat, and simmer until the juice is reduced by half — about an hour and a half. Remove from heat, and let it cool completely before using. It will thicken more as it cools.
Lesson #5 – Sometimes we must muddle through
Kelly Klocek is the co-owner of Squeeze the Day NH, a lemonade and limeade food truck based in Londonderry. She agrees that lemonade is a fantastic canvas for flavors but has a different outlook on squeezing lemons.
“We started off hand-muddling,” Klocek said. [Muddling is a bartending technique where aromatic ingredients are crushed in the bottom of a cup with a stout stick.] “We don’t squeeze the lemon juice out. We actually slice the lemon and we slice it right into the cup. We’ve had bigger events now [where] we can’t keep up with the hand-muddling, so we made a muddler ourselves and it kind of smashes the lemon in the cup. So it keeps all the lemon zest and everything, all the oils from the lemon, everything about the lemon in that cup. It gives it a stronger lemon flavor, and I think that’s what everyone really likes. And then we just add the sugar to it, ice and water and that’s it. We shake it up and we serve it out the window.”
Klocek said this classic mixture pairs well with many other flavors.
“The other thing you can do with our lemonade is that we have 17 flavor options and you can mix and match any of those flavors in your lemonade,” she said. “We’ve had every combination. We started off only with four flavors and customers suggested other flavors to us and that’s how we added to our menu. One of our top sellers right now, which I didn’t think would be possible, would be lavender. Lavender lemonade. It’s crazy. That and our prickly pear.”
According to Klocek, one of the keys to a great lemonade that gets overlooked is the ice. To properly chill lemonade, she said, smaller pieces of ice work better than big cubes.
“We use a, it’s like not a full cube, but it’s not crushed either,” she said. ”We like it broken up. We are eventually going to be looking into using nugget ice cubes because we’ve definitely noticed that the smaller ice cubes are just much better with the drink.”
Klocek admitted there is one drawback to muddling lemons for lemonade: the seeds.
“We’ve noticed that some of our competitors like to promote the use of boba straws, the really wide ones. We tried that once and we didn’t like it, because we kept sucking up the seeds. We’ve gone with a classic, smaller straw and we haven’t seen much of a problem with that. It helps with kids as well because they hate getting the seeds.”
Lavender Simple Syrup
1 cup (200 g) sugar
1 cup (8 ounces) water
2½ Tablespoons (3 g) dried lavender
1 Tablespoon fresh squeezed lemon juice
Combine the sugar, water and lavender in a saucepan, and cook over medium-low heat. Bring to a low boil, and cook for another 10 minutes. Remove from heat, and stir in the lemon juice.
Let the lavender steep for 20 minutes or so, then strain with a fine-mesh strainer. Gently press on the flower buds to squeeze extra flavor out.
Lesson #6 – Build a better lemonade and the world will beat a path to your door
Erin Doonan is the owner of Pours and Petals Mobile Bar and Catering in Concord, a boutique catering company known for its lemonade.
“I absolutely love lemonade,” she said. “That is really what inspired me to start my business in the first place. I think lemonade really makes people happy. It’s like the one drink that we have found that just satisfies everyone’s sweet tooth. Everyone likes lemonade. You rarely find people that don’t. It also brings a feeling of nostalgia and happiness back to people. I also think it’s really hard to find places that have really good lemonade around here. That’s really what we’re trying to bring to people. You don’t have to go to a fair to get a good lemonade; we’re going to bring that lemonade to you.”
Doonan’s lemonade starts from a standard recipe with simple, but high-quality ingredients.
“Our base lemonade is homemade,” she said, “and we make it with pure lemon juice and cane sugar and water. It’s as simple as that. People ask if we have a secret ingredient. We don’t. We just have our special ratio that we use, so we make that and then we add a bunch of different all-natural flavors that we have. We have a mix of muddled fruits like strawberry-basil and raspberry-lime and then we also have organic simple syrups that we use to flavor the lemonades.”
Lesson #7 – Follow your dreams
Meg Wright’s lemonade recipe came to her in a dream.
Wright is the owner of Two Moons Coffee & Curiosities in Manchester’s Millyard. One of her biggest sellers this summer is a Chappell Roan-themed lemonade called Pink Pony Club, made with watermelon juice, fresh mint and sparkly luster dust.
“Over the past couple of days,” Wright said, “we’ve gone through seven gallons of it.”
“It’s a stack drink,” Wright said. “We use nugget ice, which helps layer the colors. Because the lemonade is a little more dense, and the watermelon juice is a little more watery, the layer of ice just balances it out. I dreamed about it; that’s kind of how I come up with ideas — I dream of things.”
The secret to a Pink Pony, Wright said, is fresh watermelon juice.
“I love watermelon,” she said, “but I don’t like the gross syrupy watermelon because it’s not real. It’s very disingenuous. So I just was like how do I do this? So I came out at home with my Vitamix, trying it out and it worked out great.”
Wright filters her watermelon juice twice.
“The first time you filter it, you just get a pile of pink glop,” she said. “And then we strain it again through a coffee sieve and it gives you just the juice. It gives you just the good flavors and nothing else.”
Lemonade
from Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (McGraw Hill Book Co., 1950)
“As American as circus day — saves lemons, gives flavor.”
Combine in saucepan – 1 cup sugar, 1 cup water, rind of two lemons, cut into pieces. Stir over low heat until sugar is dissolved. Boil about 7 minutes. Cool.
Add – 1 cup lemon juice (5 to 6 lemons), 4 cups ice water.
Pour over ice in pitcher or tall glasses. Amount: 6 to 8 servings.
