Non-Alcoholic Drinks
113 recipes found
Chamomile Lime Rickey
A floral twist on a classic, this delicious fizzy limeade is the perfect front-porch sipper on a warm afternoon. The chamomile adds some sunshine to this refresher, and little ones will love it as well. You just might find yourself making — or craving — this every summer weekend.
Chocolate Milk
Making chocolate milk from scratch is fast, easy and delivers a deep chocolate flavor. The base syrup here doubles down on chocolate, combining unsweetened cocoa powder with chocolate containing 100 percent cacao. Their bitter edge balance the sweetness nicely. The syrup is also quite versatile: Feel free to use it in coffee, cocktails and even soda water if that's your thing.
Agua Fresca de Jamaica
Ginger Ale
Sasha Petraske’s ginger ale base at Drinkshop calls for lime juice instead of lemon. It is an ingredient in the slyly named Presbyterian, which includes bourbon or rum blended with ale and club soda, and topped with a twist of lemon.
Homemade Ginger Beer
To get the full aromatic flush and fizzy burn of fresh ginger, you have to make your own ginger beer. It is amazingly simple. There’s no sterilization needed, and this method is forgiving — you can actually play about with the levels and ingredients. Moreover, the resulting ginger beer blows anything else you’ve ever had straight out of contention. Take a pinch of packaged yeast and something acidic for the yeast to thrive in (like lemon or lime juice or cream of tartar) along with some sugar syrup and grated ginger, lob it all in a plastic bottle of distilled or spring water, shake it up and stash it somewhere dark and warm for two days. After two days you stop the fermentation by chilling it in the fridge. That’s it. The result is a cloudy, dry mixer with pinprick carbonation and a straight-up goose of fresh ginger. That is thrilling come dark ’n’ stormy hour, not just for its authenticity and superior flavor but also because you can now brag about your homemade ginger beer.
Raw Lime Cordial
Cordials can be a bit cowlick-y, sticking out here and there: kind of tart, kind of sweet, a bit bitter, and all a touch in disarray. But giving them 24 hours to mellow or cure in the refrigerator somehow brings them into harmony. This uncooked cordial requires a lot of time but none of it at the stove, and results in mind-boggling flavor: a dense, sweet syrup with a magnified fresh lime aroma and the perfect tart zip.
Spicy Simple Syrup
This recipe is a loose template; use any spice that seems festive and appealing to you, but bear in mind you are adding a relatively small amount of syrup per drink, so it pays to make it forceful. This blend includes cinnamon, allspice, star anise, cloves, vanilla and ginger root.
White Peach Purée
Puréeing fresh white peaches, a main ingredient in Bellinis, the signature Venetian drink, creates a perfect simulacrum between baby food and wallpaper paste — a dull, brownish pap with a smattering of bright pink rags scattered through it. Worse yet, this dubious pudding begins almost immediately to oxidize, turning into a brown-gray of even less distinction. But add a splash of lemon juice and something much better happens. The lemon leaches the brilliant pink hue from the skins of the peach and incorporates it into the whole, brightening the mix, amplifying the aroma and transforming it all into the very manna you’d want from this fruit.
Spa Cooler
Almond and Macadamia Nut Milk
Homemade Orgeat Syrup
Mai tai recipes call for a seldom-employed artificial almond syrup called orgeat, or orzata, depending on whether you’re buying the faux-French version or the faux-Italian one. The problem is that faux-ness. Though orgeat is conceptually tethered to tiki, its twisted history predates tiki’s by a long stretch. Orge is the French for “barley,” and orgeat, orzata or, in Spanish, horchata, originally referred to a common method of making barley water, a nourishing drink, by crushing the grain in a mortar and pestle and adding water to it to emulsify the fats. Along the line, almonds were added to the mix, and eventually the humble grain got shoved out in favor of the rich and aromatic nut.
Dirty Horchata
Horchata, a sweet cinnamon drink popular throughout Latin America, is typically made by soaking white rice in water, straining through a fine-mesh sieve to eliminate solids, if desired, then sweetening the liquid with sugar and cinnamon. But the horchata at Guisados, a chain of taco restaurants in Los Angeles, is different. It's made with whole milk and is served plain, or “dirty” with a shot of cold brew concentrate — and the chain sells up to 700 a day. This is an adaptation of its caffeinated version, and it serves a crowd. (You can leave out the coffee or halve the recipe, if you like.) Enjoy it with something spicy on a hot summer’s day.
Espresso Frappe
Grenadine Syrup
Making grenadine, the pomegranate-based simple syrup that was favored in many cocktails in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is really quite simple. And homemade is a vast improvement on the red-dyed sugar water in markets. Once you’ve rounded up the materials, 15 minutes’ light work will make enough to last you.
Kunun Gyada (Spiced Peanut Rice Porridge)
Short-grain rice imparts a subtle sweetness to this creamy, peanutty blend. Aromatic cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cloves — or any other warming spices — meld into the comforting porridge, which is often served at the beginning or end of the day as a means of filling the gap between meals in northern Nigeria. Serve hot or room temperature, with a dab of tamarind purée for a bit of acid and some granulated sugar, honey or dates for sweetness. Or, mix the porridge with kefir for a drinkable version (see Tips).
Cola Syrup
Watermelon Punch
Squeezing lemons and limes into watermelon juice and adding some seltzer produces a sparkling watermelon punch. It’s a cut above lemonade. Keep a pitcher of it on ice for summer afternoons.
Broth for Long Life
Ginseng Tea
Ginseng is believed by the Chinese to brighten the eyes, enlighten the mind and increase wisdom. Western medicine will only concede the eye part, although a cup of ginseng tea when you're feeling low can be so restorative that you might believe the East is on to something.
Hibiscus Hot Iced Tea
Honey-Roasted-Licorice Tea
Reishi Tea
Coconut Milk
