Limonana
Lemon juice and mint blended with ice to a bright green slush.
CC BY-SA 3.0 · Cropped, white-balanced, graded and re-encoded to WebP by eXir.
A tall glass of blended, bright green mint lemonade slush with a straw
Serving
Drink spec, per drink
Every figure above is per drink and does not move with the count, which is what makes the two service modes comparable. Sugar per litre, strength and standard drinks stay in the units their own authorities publish, because they are figures for comparing rather than for pouring.
Diet and allergen labels are computed from the ingredients listed on this page and nothing else. They cannot account for cross-contamination or for the particular product you buy, and they are not medical or safety guidance.
Ingredients
60 ml fresh lemon juice
45 ml simple syrup
8 g mint
60 ml water- 200 g water
- 60 ml fresh lemon juice
- 45 ml simple syrup
- 8 g mint
- 60 ml water
- 200 g water
Glass
Vessel
365 ml of liquid, served without ice, inside the 400 ml the glass holds. The build fails if a recipe ever exceeds its stated vessel.
A batch needs a vessel that closes and fits a fridge shelf.
Method
3 steps · 1m 5sCombine the 60 ml fresh lemon juice, the 45 ml simple syrup, the 8 g mint and the 60 ml water in a blender with the 200 g water.
Blend for 30s, until the mint is broken down fine and the drink is a smooth, pale green slush.
Pour, unstrained, into a tall glass.
The mint is blended whole rather than muddled first, so the blades do the bruising; a long blend on a full jug of ice is what breaks the leaf down fine enough to turn the whole drink pale green rather than leaving flecks in a yellow one.
Common pitfallBlended past a slush into a thin liquid, the drink separates within minutes into a layer of lemon water under a cap of melted ice. It is built to be served and drunk immediately, not held.
Keeping and make-ahead
This drink is made to order.
About
A blended lemon-mint drink with roots in an older Middle Eastern sharbat tradition, whose Israeli name and modern popularity both trace to a 1990s advertising campaign for a product that did not yet exist.
A lemon-and-mint drink is recorded in the Middle East well before its modern Israeli name existed. A 13th-century recipe by the Andalusian scholar Ibn al-Baytar calls for sugar, lemon juice, mint and water, and other regional accounts trace sweetened lemon drinks to medieval Cairo and to Ottoman Turkey and Syria 1. The combination is common enough across the region that several countries claim it as their own, without a single documented point of origin 2.
The name limonana, and much of the drink's current popularity in Israel, comes from somewhere much more recent. In the 1990s, the advertising agency Fogel-Levin ran a bus campaign for a product called Limonana, featuring celebrities promoting it, before the drink existed as an actual product 2. The name itself is a portmanteau of the Hebrew and Arabic words for lemon and mint 1. Customers began asking for the drink by that name at restaurants and market stalls, and once the demand was real, restaurants and soft-drink makers began making an actual limonana to match it 2.
The blended, semi-frozen style served today (lemon juice and mint blended directly with ice rather than poured over it) is now closely associated with Israel specifically, sometimes informally called the country's national drink, though the designation carries no official status 1.
- 1Mint lemonadeen.wikipedia.org
- 2Israel's Mint Lemonade Is An Advertising Fantasy Come To Lifefoodrepublic.com