Experiment to Find the Best Lemonade Recipe

Finding the BEST lemonade recipe is absolutely a matter of personal preference. Too sweet, too sour, too watery? All possibilities when you find a random recipe on the internet. So, to avoid committing to making someone else’s recipe and being disappointed, here is a simple experiment to find what your family likes best. Once found, that can be your family lemonade recipe for all time!

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Why I Love This Experiment?

Ever look for a long form activity which will keep your kids attention? This covered about half a day of on and off activity. Shopping for the ingredients, tasting the ingredients, writing it all down, etc. My hyper active 6 year old was enamoured with the process of creating something from scratch and was proud of the result. It worked so well, I hope others will try our experiment to find their best Lemonade Recipe.

Ingredients & Equipment

Ingredients

• Lemons: At our store, we had three types of lemons to choose from, small, large, and Meyer lemons. We chose to go with the small and large lemons, excluding the Meyer lemons due to cost. I would hate for the best lemonade to come from the most costly lemons, so we kept it simple.
• Sweetener: We looked through a few lemonade recipes and settled on making a simple syrup for the sweetener. This had a few added bonuses: we were sure that the sugar was dissolved into the lemonade and we could make a mini experiment out of the simple syrup preparation. You can find that HERE!

Equipment

• Lemon Squeezer: Because you need every last drop of juice from those lemons, I suggest investing in a lemon squeezer to make the job easier. An orange juicer would also work, and would probably be doable for the kids.
• Pitcher: You need somewhere to put the finished product!
• Measuring spoons: This experiment uses small amounts of combined ingredients to play with the flavors. Combining and tasting teaspoons of liquid is faster and less wasteful than cups of lemonade.

The Lemonade Experiment

1. Make the simple syrup. This is simply combining 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of water and add heat. You don’t need to actually boil it, our dissolved with a quick stir around 100*F.
2. Squeeze your lemons. Using a lemon juicer is key here to get the most juice out of each lemon. I think it was 4 large lemons for 1 cup of lemon juice.
3. Now that you have lemon juice and simple syrup, start combing them and trying different ratios. I combined tablespoons of each to make it quick and accurate, and we didn’t use a bunch of materials experimenting. The fun is in tasting each step, so here is the options we used.
   1. Straight lemon juice (take a picture or video, its hilarious)
   2. Straight syrup
   3. 1:1 lemon to syrup
   4. 1:2 lemon to syrup (this was our golden ratio)
   5. 1:3 lemon to syrup
   6. 1:4 lemon to syrup
   7. 2:1 lemon to syrup
   8. 3:1 lemon to syrup
4. Take notes on each of the above as you taste them. Find which one you like best.
5. Add portions of water in a 1:1 with everything else. So I added tablespoons of water to our preferred ratio until it was perfect.
6. Spoiler: Our perfect ratio was 1:1.5:3 lemon:syrup:water. So if you added a cup of lemon juice, add two cups of simple syrup, and three cups of water.
7. Add ice and enjoy your new family lemonade recipe.

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