A New Way with Lemonade

When I was a kid, my family made lemonade the old-fashioned way: We fetched a small cardboard canister from the freezer, peeled away the plastic tab, pried off the lid, and squeezed until a semisolid cylinder of concentrate dropped into the waiting pitcher with a satisfying schloop. After whisking in three cans’ worth of water, we were ready to pour it over ice and enjoy.

I was nearly an adult before I learned that there are methods for making lemonade that involve fresh fruit, and that good from‑scratch versions boast a sweet-sour balance and faint bitterness that make lemonade not just refreshing but also complex. But until recently, I’d never made a batch that delivered on that nuance. Most of my previous attempts tasted either one‑dimensional or excessively bitter.

It wasn’t until I literally took apart a lemon and tasted each component that I understood what accounts for the Goldilocks balance I sought (turns out there’s some complex chemistry behind it all) and came up with a simple science-based method for making pitch‑perfect lemonade. Here’s how my testing went down and what I learned. (Spoiler alert: There’s a twist that circles back to my childhood lemonade.)

I read through dozens of lemonade recipes, and the key difference among them appeared to be which parts of the lemon they used. At one end of the spectrum was the classic combination of fresh-squeezed juice, simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water), and water. A notch up from that was a popular method that called for muddling lemon slices and sugar with a potato masher and then mixing in the water. And then there were a handful of lemon-intensive approaches. One called for grinding strips of zest with sugar in a food processor and combining the mixture with lemon juice and water; another called for blending chunks of lemon—pith, peel, and all—with ice, sugar, and water.

I tried them all, and the range of flavors was both striking and informative. Juice-only lemonades tasted flat and basic, like lemon candy, while those that incorporated the peel and pith were markedly more complex. That said, all the lemon-intensive formulas overshot my target bitterness to varying degrees. (The blender-ade actually made me flinch.) Besides, hauling out small appliances seemed like much ado for a carefree summer drink.

Muddling lemon slices with sugar was the most promising: The result tasted vibrant and complex—and while it was still too bitter for my liking, it was less harsh than the drinks produced by more extreme methods. Plus, it was easy to do. I needed to figure out exactly what produced the bitterness in lemonade and how I could calibrate it.

I’d always accepted the conventional wisdom that bitterness in citrus comes from the cottony white layer of pith right under the colorful zest, but my colleague Paul Adams challenged me on this point: “How do you know it’s bitter? Have you tasted it?”

Enter my lemon dissection project. I dutifully pulled one apart, tasting each of its parts separately. The pulp was predictably sour. The membranes between the segments were chewy but neutral. The zest was slightly sweet, a bit spicy and floral, and faintly bitter—exactly what I was looking for. Then I braced myself and nibbled at the sliver of pith I’d prepared, and my mind was blown: It had absolutely no flavor.

At first, I thought the commonly held assumption about the pith’s bitterness had been completely off base, but it turned out that wasn’t quite right either. Further research revealed that the pith isn’t bitter on its own, but if you break its cells together with the zest’s, this triggers a reaction between the two components that produces more bitterness than the zest has on its own. That’s why the food processor and blender lemonades tasted unpalatably bitter; the muddled-slices batch, less offensive but still too sharp; and the juice-only versions, innocuous but blah.

Now I understood that it was zest—and zest alone—that would add just the right dimension to my lemonade and that I needed to harvest it while disturbing the pith as little as possible. So I grabbed a vegetable peeler, carefully pared thin strips of zest from two lemons, and tossed them with ¾ cup of sugar. Then I mashed and muddled, gently abrading the zest until the sugar was visibly damp and the air was fragrant.

I added hot water to dissolve the sugar, making a lemon-infused simple syrup of sorts, and juiced the zested lemons plus three more. Knowing that heat dampens the brightness and complexity of citrus juice, I waited until the syrup had cooled completely before stirring in the lemon juice. I strained out the zest, mixed in an equal amount of cold water, poured it over ice, and was rewarded with my best batch yet: bracingly sour and sweet, with bitterness that was just a smidge over the line. (When zest meets juice, some of the same reactions that cause bitterness happen.) But it was an easy fix: I added a dash of salt—a trick we often use to mask bitterness and enhance other flavors in foods such as eggplant and coffee—to dull its harsh edge, leaving the lemonade perfectly balanced.

One more thing. I kept coming back to the perks of lemonade concentrate: its dump-and-stir ease, its compact format, and the option to transform the mixture into sparkling lemonade or even a cocktail with a simple swap of the liquid used to dilute it. So I decided to make my recipe into a fresh concentrate by waiting to dilute it with water until just before serving. (The same approach worked beautifully for limeade, too.) The concentrate kept well in the fridge for up to two weeks, though it never lasted that long. Because the best part of having fresh concentrate was that I could make lemonade—still, sparkling, or spirited—by the glass any time I wanted.