After Beyoncé dropped “Lemonade” last weekend, an explosion of think-pieces, criticisms, and Bey-hive witch hunts detonated. We were given so many metaphors to pore over and read into, but in all the hubbub we were given something else, something important, that was easy to overlook: literal lemonade. There is nothing remotely basic about Beyonce, but the lemonade recipe she shared on the visual album was gloriously simple: her grandmother Agnez Dereon’s recipe for the golden beverage is a classic staple. We may never know who Becky with the Good Hair is, but we now hold the key to one of the Knowles family treasures — ok maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it’s certainly the quickest and cheapest way to have a shared experience with Queen Bey. We decided to test it out … and while we were at it, we couldn’t stop ourselves from BKTXing it up a bit. There are a lot of food references throughout all of “Lemonade,” particularly in “Formation,” so we decided to take the hot sauce out of our bags and sip our Cuervo, not with a chaser, but mixed into our Spicy Pink Watermelon Lemonade.
Agnez Deréon’s Lemonade Recipe
8 lemons
1 pint water
1/2 pound sugar
Take one pint of water, add a half-pound of sugar, the juice of 8 lemons, and the zest of half of a lemon. Pour the water from one jug into the other several times, strain through a clean napkin.
BKTX Spicy Pink Watermelon Lemonade Recipe
8 lemons (extra for garnish)
1 bottle of Topo Chico Agua Mineral (if you live in NYC this may be hard to come by... we used Boylan Seltzer)
1/2 pound sugar
3 cups of watermelon juice (about 1/4 watermelon)
1/4 teaspoon of Habanero Tabasco Sauce
1 Habanero, halved and seeded.
Juice lemons and watermelon separately and set aside. Whisk lemon juice, sugar, and seltzer water until the sugar is dissolved. Stir in the watermelon juice and Tabasco Sauce. Taste and add more seltzer if necessary. Add the habanero and refrigerate overnight (or until you have reached your desired level of hotness)! Spike with Cuervo and serve over ice with slices of lemon.