A Less Sugary Lemonade

By Katie Barreira

I love lemonade, but have you ever looked at the label? Sugar usually comes before lemon juice! How to enjoy my favorite summer refresher without sucking down my weight in sucrose?

Well, if I could somehow make the lemonade less tart then I wouldn’t need as much sugar to balance it out. Solution: the orange-hued Meyer lemon, a hybrid between a lemon and a tangerine, which has a natural floral-like sweetness and lower acidity than a traditional lip-puckering lemon.

Now that I was using less sugar, I had to consider its form. Typically, I make lemonade with simple syrup (a combination of sugar and water that’s been heated until the sugar dissolves) because this combines effortlessly into the cold water and lemon juice. But in a moment of food science inspiration, I recalled this tidbit from a cocktail class: when heated, sucrose turns into higher viscosity fructose, from which our palates don’t register flavor as well. So, by keeping all the ingredients cold and using a little elbow grease, I could make the lemonade taste sweeter with less sugar.

Finally, top the lemonade off with a splash of sparkling water; there’s nothing like a little effervescence to make a person feel refreshed.

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Playing With Preserved Lemons

By Katie Barreira

Say preserving in August and the culinary mind jumps to mason jars and piles of late-summer produce. But canning isn’t the only way to preserve, and summer isn’t the only time to do it. This past winter, when citrus was about it for fresh fruit, I decided to preserve some lemons. A staple in Moroccan cooking, preserved lemons are salt cured with spices like black pepper and cinnamon. The result is a soft, entirely edible (though, like a fresh lemon, you wouldn’t want to eat it on it’s own) lemon that adds a rich, pickled lemon flavor to drinks, dinner and even dessert.

Preserved lemons can be found in gourmet food shops; seek them out and add a whole new dimension to your cooking; I did!

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