A recipe with no complicated ingredients

Let’s make some sprite! This lemon-lime soda couldn’t be any easier, and the result tasted very very close to the stuff you can buy off the shelves, although maybe a little fresher. It doesn’t require any complicated ingredients, just some time to make what is known as an oleo sacrum which is the key to getting a drink that tastes less like lemonade, and more like, well sprite. so let’s started

Preparing the Citrus

Sprite is flavored from a mixture of lemon and lime. I always had figured it could be made by just mixing the juice of lemon and lime with soda water and sugar, but the resulting drink would be way too sour, and not have that overarching deeper citrus flavor. So today we are going to use a method to extract the oils from the rinds of the citrus, resulting in a more mellow, deeper citrus flavor.

So for this recipe let’s start with our citrus, we are going to need 4 limes and 2 lemons. For the limes, we wanna use the normal ones, not key limes or the limes with the thin skins.
So speaking of peels, we want to peel these limes and lemons. Try to get as much of the peel, and as little of the pith as possible. (Don’t throw the limes and lemons out after peeling, we still have use for them). Peel all of the limes and lemons, making a nice citrus pile. Now Sprite is a mix of lemon and lime, but there isn’t any reason you could add orange into the mix, or even go for all oranges to make some Fanta using the same method, I am about to show you. Once everything is peeled we want to place them into a bowl and add ½ cup or 100 grams of granulated sugar. Mix the sugar and peels thoroughly. We want to ensure that every peel is coated in sugar.

The next part of this is just to let it sit. What will happen is due to the process of osmosis, the oils from the citrus peels will be extracted, however, this is going to take a while to happen, so we just are going to let this sit and let the sugar do its job for anywhere from 6 to 24 hours. The longer it sits the more citrus oil will be extracted. It’s also not a bad idea to give these peels a stir once or twice to ensure maximum oil exactitude.

Alright now let’s turn back to the actual limes and lemons. We are going to want to use some of the juice to add a little bit of zing to our final soda, so juice them all up to put it in the fridge for later.

Oleo Saccharum

Ok, after our citrus has had time to interact with the sugar, we should see that there is a runny sugary liquid that has collected under the peels, this is our Oleo Saccharum or translated from Latin, sugar oil. Although it doesn’t look the most appetizing, this stuff is amazing, it’s a sweet flavored sugar liquid that really captures the essence of the citrus peels. We want to filter out and extract as much of this stuff as possible. Using a sieve, try to rub off as much of the sugar syrup as possible collecting it into a bowl. This is a slow going and annoying process, but it’s worth every drop of this stuff you can extract. If you are having trouble getting all of it off, you can follow my lead and add a tablespoon of water to help rinse off the peels, however, this step is somewhat controversial, because we can get separation between the citrus oils and water. However since we intend to add this to sparkling water anyways, it’s fine, and honestly, the emulsion turned out to be pretty stable.

Alright, now we can perform the last steps to make some sprite from this liquid gold. First, we want to add some of the lemon-lime juice back into the syrup, I used 4 teaspoons, enough to give a little bit of a zing, not enough to make it taste like lemonade.

Add a tablespoon of the syrup to a glass and add some sparkling water to it and give it a stir, and voila we have ourselves a nice refreshing Sprite.

Condensed Recipe:

Ingredients:

Oleo Saccharum:

4 limes
2 lemons
1/2 cup [100 grams] granulated sugar

Extras:

Soda water

Instructions:

Peel lemons and limes, collect peels in a bowl, and add granulated sugar, tossing to coat each peel. Let the peels sit for anywhere from 6-24 hours.
Juice citrus.
After 6-24 hours strain collected liquid, add 4 tsp of lemon-lime juice, and mix with soda water.
Enjoy!

Sprite