Story and Recipe collected by Alejandro Gomez , Summer 2020
Usually when I think about making a fresh agua de fruta, I think about using the actual “meat” of the fruit. But something that my dad taught me is that when making agua de lima, you have to use the skin/peel. Now I was like “ what you talkin bout dad”, I was forsure thinking that it was going to be sour. Lima is a mix between an orange and a lime. The smell is very sweet and you can distinguish it from all others. The smell actually comes from the peel. My favorite thing to do when I’m trying to figure out if the fruit is a lemon or a lima is to scratch the peel and smell. A sort of scratch and sniff. So what my dad does is peel the lima and put the pieces of the peel in the blender. Once they are all in there, he adds about a cup of water and then blend it up. Once the peel is well blended, my dad filters it through an aluminum filter. This makes sure that no piece off the peel gets into the water, cause then it would be too sour. Then the left over water that comes from the filter goes into the container that we will be using to hold the agua. Then we add about 4 tablespoons of sugar and about two more cups of water. Then mix until you like it. The water usually has a light green tone to it. Add ice cubes and it's good to go.
Ingredients:
3-4 Limas
Sugar
Water
Blender
Filter
Steps:
Peel the lima’s and place the peels in a blender
Place a cup of water into the blender with the lima peels
Blend until there is no more large pieces of lima left
While that is blending, in the container that you want to store the agua in, place two cups of water with a teaspoon of sugar, mix.
After the lima is blended well, use the aluminum filter to get rid of any pulp that could still be in the mixture.
Once it's all filtered out then it should only be liquid, no signs of a peel.
Place the filtered liquid into the container with the sugar water.
Mix well
Taste and if needed add more sugar.
Done