Homemade Lemon Iced Tea
Despite being on some weird kind of diet, best described as the „Jamie and Her Husband Try Fruit For a Change“-Diet, I made some lemon iced tea yesterday. The main reason was that I have some lemon squash juice that is a bit past its expiration date, but only a couple of days, so I can’t bring myself to throw it away and had to find things to use it for.
I quickly settled on lemon iced tea, because it seemed easy and I always wanted to try to make some myself. So I looked around on the internet and found a recipe which I altered slightly and made my own. I’m still not satisfied for several reasons, so the next time I will change it a bit until I found just the right way to make the perfect lemon iced tea.
Here’s how I made it:
3/4 l of water
2 bags of ordinary black tea
75 g sugar
60 ml lemon juice
1 cinnamon stick
I boiled the water and then removed the pot from the heat, added the tea bags and let it just steep for about half an hour or 3/4 of the length of an episode of The West Wing.
Then I used my new digital scale, which I’m oh so proud of, and measured exactly 75 g of sugar. Of course it wouldn’t have hurt had it been 74 g or 77 g, but hey, since I now can measure everything to the very gram of it, why shouldn’t I? This is why it’s so much fun to have a digital scale.
I added the sugar and lemon squash juice and stirred until I was pretty sure all the sugar had dissolved. I then filled a bottle with the tea and added a stick of cinnamon. The cinnamon was a spur of the moment thing, since just this Saturday I had bought a bag of cinnamon for remarkably little money at a Japanese grocery store and they were lying around on the counter when I made the iced tea.
Then I just put the bottle in the fridge and waited until… today!
So today was the day I tried my first glass of homemade lemon iced tea. It wasn’t too bad, but it could need a bit of improvement. For once I think that it was both too sweet and too bitter, however that’s possible. So the next time I will take the tea bags out earlier (say after twenty minutes maybe) and add less sugar (I guess around 50 g). I’m not sure yet.
The good thing is that this is such an easy thing to make, so it doesn’t matter if you have to experiment a bit first, since it’s cheap,quick easy to make. No fuss at all.