Wednesday, March 28, 2012

natural soda

Though I am not a fan of caramel color, diet anything, or soda, in general, I love carbonation. Aqua gaseosa, or rather acqua gassata. I drink Pellegrino every night. Sometimes with lemon. Recently, I started reminiscing about Orangina and other natural sodas I used to sometimes pick up before work. And I started creating my own natural sodas to have with dinner.

The one I have adored recently is grapefruit soda with freshly squeezed grapefruit. My kids love grapefruit, but it is a high maintenance fruit to peel for them. I can't just send them off with a grapefruit. I have to peel it, then unsheath it from its membrane, then my children will eat it out of my hand as though they are farm animals and I have corn.

Because of this, I often have slightly wrinkled grapefruit that are overly juicy and therefore not preferable to feed to the children. So I juice them. I let them build into a substantial pile, then juice them in one fail swoop, keeping it in a jar and creating sodas at night with dinner. This morning, I was creating a grapefruit-mint soda which was amazing!


Our peppermint has come up already, so I just picked some fresh peppermint from the yard, (about four springs) and used two grapefruit. I wanted to save the rest of the juice for tonight/tomorrow. Fresh juice lasts a few days. I try to use it in two to three days. If you are making one soda, you need half a grapefruit and one sprig. You can use a citrus juicer, though I used my Omega, because I wanted to juice the mint with the grapefruit. I imagine without a juicer, you can chop your mint up, muddle it on the bottom of the glass with ice, like a mint julep. And you need a bottle of fizzy, or as I call it, fuzzy water. I use Pellegrino, because I like naturally occurring carbonation. Just make sure it is not tonic water, or club soda. No sugar added. And club soda has a higher sodium content. 


 Anyway, juice the hell out of two grapefruit and the mint.



Fill a glass with ice.


Fill the glass about a third filled with grapefruit-mint juice.


Then to the top with Pellegrino.



You can put a sprig of mint in, though I just chugged it. It was amazing. The mint neutralizes the real tartness of the grapefruit. It is awesome.

I create different natural sodas constantly. I sometimes use berries instead of ice. One of my favorite concoctions is Orange-Mango juice, frozen berries and Pellegrino. AMAZING! (That is what is in the bottom glass!)



3 comments:

HereWeGoAJen said...

Yum! I need to do this. I've made soda occasionally, but not for a while.

Anonymous said...

In my neck of the woods, we're crazy about sparkly fruit-juice-mixes (called "Schorle"). Mostly applejuice with bubbly water. My favourite summerdrink: one third apple juice, two thirds bubbly water and a squeezed lime... yum.

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