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Peach Lemonade

Ripe peaches blitzed into fresh lemonade, strained smooth. Nothing from a bottle, ready in ten minutes.

Prep
10 min
Cook
5 min
Makes
Makes about 6 cups (1.5 liters), serves 6
Jump to the recipe
A glass of peach-coloured lemonade with fruit and ice
Photo: makafood / Pexels

Two things make the difference between this and store-bought lemonade.

Make a syrup rather than stirring sugar into cold liquid. Sugar barely dissolves in cold water — it sinks, and you end up with a sweet last inch and a sour first one. Two minutes on the stovetop with equal water fixes it permanently.

And use peaches that are actually ripe: fragrant at the stem, giving slightly under a thumb. An underripe peach has almost no aroma and a mealy texture, and blending does not improve either. If yours are hard, leave them in a paper bag on the counter for two days. Frozen peaches are a better bet than fresh-but-unripe ones, and they chill the drink as they blend.

Strain it. Peach skins and fibres make the lemonade cloudy and slightly furry on the tongue, and thirty seconds through a sieve removes both.

Freeze what is left into cubes and you have the base for a frozen lemonade slush.

A tall glass of peach lemonade with mint
Photo: Arina Krasnikova / Pexels

Peach lemonade drink, printed

Ripe peaches blitzed into fresh lemonade, strained smooth. Nothing from a bottle, ready in ten minutes.

Syrup, then the lemonade

For the syrup

  • ¾ cup (150 g) superfine sugar
  • ⅔ cup (150 ml) water

For the lemonade

  • 4 ripe peaches, stoned and roughly chopped
  • 1 cup (240 ml) lemon juice, from about 6 lemons
  • 3¾ cups (900 ml) cold water
  • Ice, lemon slices and mint, to serve

Blending and straining

  1. 1 Heat the sugar and water in a small pan, stirring, just until the sugar dissolves. Do not boil it down — this is a syrup, not a caramel. Cool it.
  2. 2 Blend the peaches with the lemon juice until completely smooth, about 45 seconds.
  3. 3 Pour the purée through a fine sieve into a pitcher, pressing the solids with the back of a ladle to get everything but the fibre.
  4. 4 Stir in the cooled syrup and the cold water. Taste and adjust — peaches vary enormously in sweetness, and this is the only moment it can be corrected.
  5. 5 Chill at least an hour. Serve over plenty of ice with lemon slices and mint.

Frozen peaches, and the syrup

  • Frozen peaches work straight from the freezer and give a colder, thicker drink. Use 500 g.
  • The syrup keeps a month refrigerated, so it is worth making double.