How to Make Lemonade: Chef John's State Fair Recipe

Wash six fresh lemons under hot water. If they feel waxy at the store, give them a real scrub - that wax sits right on top of where you're about to take the zest. Then run a vegetable peeler down each lemon and strip off the yellow zest in long ribbons.

You want the yellow part, not the white pith underneath. A little bit of white is fine. Don't go too deep or the lemonade picks up bitterness. Save every peeled lemon - you'll juice them later, and you need every drop.

Drop all the lemon zest into a bowl and pour 1 1/2 cups of granulated white sugar right on top. Stir it with a spoon or your hands until every piece of peel is coated and the sugar looks slightly damp from contact with the oils.

The reason this recipe is so much better than ordinary lemonade comes down to one thing: the oils trapped in the peel hold most of the lemon flavor. The juice is bright and tangy, but the peel is where the deep, perfumed lemon character lives. Sugar pulls those oils out by osmosis - it's the whole trick.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a plate and leave it on the counter. Two hours is the minimum. Twelve hours is even better. The sugar slowly draws the essential oils out of the peels, and what you end up with is a damp, fragrant, golden sugar that smells like the most concentrated lemon you've ever encountered.

This mixture has a name. The ancient Romans called it oleo-saccharum, which translates to oily sugar. It's the same technique a good cocktail bar uses for fresh-citrus punches. When you peek under the plastic wrap a few hours in, the peels will look limp and the sugar will look wet around the edges. That's the flavor moving where you want it.

Put 5 cups of cold fresh water in a saucepan over high heat and bring it up to a boil. The moment it boils, kill the heat. You're not going to cook anything - the boil is just to get the water hot enough to dissolve the sugar quickly.

Tip the entire oleo-saccharum mixture, peels and all, into the hot water. Stir it gently and let it sit there for about five minutes. The sugar will dissolve completely and the hot water will pull out any remaining flavor still clinging to the peels.

Pour the hot syrup through a fine-mesh strainer back into a clean bowl. The peels have given up everything they had to give - throw them in the compost. What's left in the bowl is a pale-gold lemon syrup that smells incredible.

Now wait. You need this syrup to come down to room temperature before you add the fresh juice. If you squeeze juice into hot syrup, the heat dulls the bright top notes you want from raw lemon. A patient cool-down is the difference between great lemonade and merely good lemonade.

Cut the six peeled lemons in half and squeeze every one through a strainer into the cooled syrup. The strainer catches the seeds and any pulp you don't want. A handheld citrus juicer makes this faster, but squeezing by hand into the strainer works perfectly well.

Taste the lemonade now. Want it more tart? Squeeze in another half lemon. Want it sweeter? Stir in a little extra sugar before it cools all the way. You're the lemonade boss here. Adjust until it tastes exactly the way you want.

Pour the finished lemonade into a glass pitcher, cover it, and put it in the refrigerator until it's properly cold. This step matters more than people think. If you pour barely-warm lemonade straight over ice, the ice melts fast and waters the whole batch down within minutes.

When the pitcher is cold all the way through, fill a glass with ice and pour. You should taste two distinct layers of lemon at once: the tart, fresh juice on top, and underneath it the deeper, almost floral flavor that came out of the peels. Once you make lemonade this way, regular lemonade is going to taste flat to you forever.