Homemade Iced Tea with Lemon: Easy Recipe for a Big Batch
Iced tea with a slice of lemon and a few ice cubes will save you from the summer heat. It is the best cooling drink for summer, when it's scorching outside, your brain is melting and you're thirsty even just wandering around the house. Your body can't take much soda, and honestly, its effect doesn't last. I remember drinking soda in the tropics: it left my body through the skin in an instant, and the agonizing thirst came right back.
But iced tea in hot weather is exactly what you need! I was surprised how well this drink quenches thirst. Surprisingly, this tea is very easy to make and has almost no calories. I'm not urging you to drink the overpriced stuff sold in plastic bottles in shops! Iced tea with lemon is extremely simple to make.
At home, making several liters of the drink takes very little time. And the chilled tea, which quenches thirst so well, will be just the way you like it, with no additives or preservatives, and in the amount you need. Ideally, if you like your tea without sugar, the drink has almost no calories at all.
Iced tea is believed to have become popular in the southern United States in the 19th century. Because of the heat, people had little interest in hot drinks, so they brewed tea, chilled it and served it with a slice of lemon.
Iced tea is easy to make at home the day before a hot day. Overnight the tea chills nicely in the fridge, and the next day you have an excellent drink. To be honest, I'm not a big fan of chilled black tea; I prefer green tea or hibiscus tea.
Ingredients
4-5 l of tea
- Water 4-5 l
- Tea 8-10 g
- Lemon 0.5
- Sugar 0-5 tbsp
Step-by-step recipe
- Pour filtered water into a 5 l pot. Bring the water to a boil and turn off the heat.
- Measure out the amount of black or green tea you need, whichever you prefer. Use good large-leaf tea. Not tea bags (you never really know what's inside them), but the loose-leaf tea you like to drink every day. Add the tea to the boiling water and leave it for 2-3 minutes.
- After 2-3 minutes, squeeze the juice of half a lemon into the tea and drop that lemon half into the tea as well.
- After 10 minutes, take the lemon out of the tea. Add sugar to the tea, strictly to your taste. We usually add 3-4 heaped tablespoons of sugar per 4-5 l of tea. But tea without sugar is perfectly fine, even very good.
- Put the pot of tea into cold water to cool. It's convenient to do this in an ordinary kitchen sink. It's best to change the water 2-3 times as it warms up. After the third time the tea will be at room temperature. Then pour the iced tea into bottles or carafes, always straining it through a fine sieve to catch the tea leaves. Put the bottled tea in the fridge for a few hours.
- Then pour the lemon tea into a glass. On hot, sweltering days it's a wonderful way to cool down. Add a few ice cubes.
- By the way, iced tea with ginger is also a very good cooling drink, although its taste is a little unusual.
| Yield: | 4-5 l of tea |
| Calories: | 8 kcal per 100 g |
| Prep time: | 5 mins |
| Cook time: | 20 mins |
| Total time: | 3-4 h including chilling |
| Category: | Desserts and Drinks |
| Cuisine: | European |
| Rating: |
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4.4
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