Okay. So.
I’ve been trying my hand at making limoncello so we’ve had a lot of lemons. What to do with them? Probably a lot of things, but we’ve been making lemonade. In our most recent batch of limoncello, we had about 44 lemons (a little under 4 pounds), which made about 5c of juice. I’m going to try freezing 1 cup in an ice cube tray (see below) so we can have easily accessible “fresh” lemon juice. In the various googling I did, I think it should last a couple months in the freezer. Fingers crossed.
But back to the lemonade.
We both prefer our lemonade to be sweet and tart, so my nearly perfect ratio is about 1:3.75:1, lemon juice to water to simple syrup in cups. Which is to say:
4c Lemon Juice
15c Water
4c Simple Syrup
It’s all to taste so my general rule is to start out with about a 1:3:.5 ratio (erring on the side of more water and simple syrup) and then go from there until it’s delicious. Also, we have a juicer, so that in itself might alter how much juice we can get from each lemon, as well as the strength of lemony taste. I feel like the amount of pulp we get when we use the electric juicer is different from what we get when I use a hand held one. Anyway, juicers are helpful in this particular situation, whether manual or electric, but you can even use tongs as a makeshift juicer, so there’s that. Unless you have the strongest hands with huge endurance. Then never mind.
Regardless, the recipe above is, again, to our taste of sweet and tart, so that might be a starting point for someone who prefers sweet over tart; but if one likes more tart, then maybe hold off on some water and simple syrup. We drink it as is, but also as a mixer for drinks.
As far as freezing the rest of the lemon juice, in a 12 cube maker, it came to about 1.5T each (so more than a cup of lemon juice leftover). I’m looking forward to seeing how it comes out in soups, dressings, drinks, roasts, etc. So many times has a recipe called for a smidge of lemon juice and I don’t have any on hand—I hope this solves the issue.