Brazilian Lemonade

While grocery shopping yesterday, I saw that limes were on sale, 10 for a dollar.  I may not always know what prices are considered good prices, but I knew that 10 cents a lime was a good deal!  I bought ten figuring that although I was not quite sure what I would do with them, I could always slice them and stick them in the freezer to add to water or iced tea at a later time.  Before slicing them all up, though, I got on-line and started searching for lime-related recipes that seemed nice and simple. I was successful and found what I thought would be very appropriate to try today since I had some time and spring/summer is (kind of) here.  I found the recipe for Brazilian lemonade. It only required 4 ingredients, and I happened to have all 4 on hand. (It turned out that one of the ingredients I had was at least 2 years past its “best by” date, so I cut my losses and bought more.) This recipe only requires LIMES, water, sugar, and sweetened condensed milk. (I wondered why this drink was called Brazilian lemonade if it is made with limes, and this is what I found. )  Here is the link to the recipe, but I can easily summarize.

I sliced the ends off of 4 clean limes and then cut them into eights.

Half of these were combined in my Blendtec with 3 cups of water and ½ cup of sugar.

This was pulsed approximately 7 times and then poured through a sieve into a pitcher.  I did squish them into the sieve using my rice paddle.

This process was repeated with the other half of the ingredients.

Finally, 6 tablespoons of sweetened condensed milk was added to the pitcher, and the whole concoction was stirred together.

I recruited my husband and son to be guinea pigs with me as we tried it.  (I added some slices of lime to the glasses to make them look fancy!) Two of the three of us thought that it was delicious!  My son was less of a fan, but that just means more for the rest of us. It was very refreshing! For me, it wasn’t too sweet or tart.  I did follow this simple recipe as listed. I am notorious for using recipes as a “guideline” more often than my family would like. I will be making another (larger) pitcher of this (with some extra lime slices thrown into the pitcher to make it look extra special) for an upcoming event, and I am looking forward to introducing it (I think that I will be the first to introduce it to them; we shall see) to my guests soon!

When I initially read the recipe, I was a little concerned about the combination of lime and sweetened condensed milk.  My past experiences with combining citrus and dairy involved adding both lemon and milk to hot tea. That is not going to happen again.  I decided to learn a little more about why this combination works for this recipe but not the hot tea. I read a few articles.  This article is a nice little review of the science. This one actually includes an experiment in addition to an explanation.  You can just read the experiment and the rest of the article to learn something. If you want, though, go ahead and experiment!

I hope that you enjoy the drink and have learned something new along the way!  Time to get ready to pick up some more limes!