Pink Lemonade
Updated June 26, 2024

- Total Time
- 20 minutes
- Prep Time
- 5 minutes
- Cook Time
- 15 minutes
- Rating
- Comments
- Read comments
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Ingredients
- 1pound fresh or frozen raspberries, halved strawberries, stemmed and pitted cherries or chopped rhubarb
- ⅔cup sugar
- ¼teaspoon fine sea salt
- 1cup fresh lemon juice, plus more to taste (from 5 to 6 lemons)
- Ice, for serving
Preparation
- Step 1
In a large saucepan, combine the fruit, sugar and 1⅔ cups water. Cook over medium-high, stirring occasionally and reducing the heat if bubbles start to rise out of the pan, until the syrup thickens a bit, at least 5 minutes and up to 15 minutes for frozen fruit. Stir in the salt.
- Step 2
Carefully strain the hot syrup through a fine-mesh sieve into a large liquid measuring cup, pressing on the fruit to extract juices then discarding the fruit. You should have about 1¾ cups syrup; if you have more, return to the pan and boil longer. (The syrup can be refrigerated, covered, for up to 1 week.)
- Step 3
To make a pitcher of lemonade, stir the syrup into 7 cups of cold filtered water. Add the lemon juice, then stir to combine. Taste, adding more lemon juice as desired. (The lemonade can be refrigerated, covered, for up to 1 week.) Serve over ice.
Private Notes
Comments
At what point do you add the Vodka?
It doesn't make sense to me to take some delicious refreshing raspberries or other fruit and cook the vitamins and the life out of them. Why not put the raspberries in a blender with a little water, blend and strain out the seeds? Add this to your lemonade. You can add sugar, or sugar syrup made by heating sugar with a little water. I'm going to make some pink lemonade today by adding the syrup from a bottle of maraschino cherries to my fresh squeezed lemon juice, sugar (or Stevia) and water.
I make a similar lemonade spritzer: freeze lemon juice into large ice cubes. Add one to a medium size glass, add 1 tbsp fruit syrup (or more to taste), and fill glass with sparkling water. Stir to melt the ice cube. A little ginger grated into the fruit syrup gives a bit of a kick, or even a 1/2 tsp of raspberry vinegar.
This was good but cooking the strawberries muted their summery freshness.
I replaced sugar with monk fruit sweetener 1/4 tsp xantham and made the most delicious and guilt free juice I have ever tasted with no fructose, no carbs, no calories, glucose, and no insulin spikes! Why drink orange juice which is literally water and sugar if you can make this amazingly refreshing pink lemonade with a sweetener that has no aftertaste like monk fruit? I am over the moon! I miss fresh juices!
Triple everything to fill a 1.9 gallon party dispenser. Use some of the mixture to freeze quart containers to keep it cold without diluting! Do NOT put the cooked strawberries in the ice molds as they tend to clog the spigot. Just use lemon slices thickly cut.
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