The Creamy Ingredient Your Fresh Squeezed Lemonade Is Missing

It doesn't get much more refreshing than drinking down a cold glass of fresh squeezed lemonade on a hot day. The iconic summer thirst-quencher perks you up with a just-right balance of tart and sweet. It's hard to improve on a classic, but you can give lemonade a smooth and creamy upgrade with one simple pantry item: sweetened condensed milk.

Creamy lemonade is simple to make with fresh squeezed lemon juice (use this trick to get more juice from the lemons), cold water, sweetened condensed milk, and ice all stirred together in a pitcher. Mix the ingredients in the blender if you'd like the lemonade to be a little frothy. Instead of using a set recipe, you have freedom to create the ratios as you like. Start with a base amount, something like 3 cups water, 1 cup lemon juice, and half of a 14-ounce can of the condensed milk. Then taste and adjust the ingredients until it's lip-smackingly sweet, tart, and creamy. You can add sugar if you want the lemonade sweeter, but it's creamy enough that you won't want to add more of the sweet milk. Swirl lemon slices in the pitcher and garnish each glass with a lemon slice and sprig of mint.

Experiment with different ways to customize your creamy lemonade. You could add muddled strawberries, peaches, cherries, or watermelon for a fruity twist; use honey or maple syrup instead of sugar for extra sweetening; incorporate herbs like mint, basil, or thyme; use plain or flavored sparkling water instead of some or all of the water to add fizz; or make it adults-only with white rum or vodka.

Creamy lemonade gets its inspiration from Brazilian limonada, which translates to lemonade but is actually limeade since Brazilian Portuguese uses the same word for limes and lemons. It also makes use of sweetened condensed milk (just like our creamy lemonade). However, it's often made by cutting the limes in quarters and pulsing them in a blender with water (skins and all) before finely straining it to remove any rind pieces. This adds a touch of bitterness to the sweet and creamy limeade.

Sweetened condensed milk (the key ingredient for both drinks which you can actually eat right out of the can) is milk that's been condensed by cooking it down, concentrating the milky flavor before sugar is added. It's an everyday product in Brazil, where it appears in another unexpected drink combination mixed with red wine. Brazilians actually call their limonada "swiss lemonade," because the common sweetened condensed milk brand Nestle has a Swiss milkmaid on the label.

If you try making Brazilian limonada, one customization which would make a particularly good match with the lime flavor is to bring in coconut (this would also work with creamy lemonade). You could substitute coconut milk and sugar for the sweetened condensed milk or use coconut water instead of regular water, or both. If you want to give limonada a boozy kick, stay true to the drink's origins with Brazilian cachaça.