How to Make Homemade Gatorade

This was my first attempt at making my own Gatorade.

The jury is still out on my feelings for it. I did take it on my long run last week and it certainly got the job done. However, I think I will tweak my ingredients just slightly next time and see if I can improve it.

Ingredients

• 2 quarts water (8 cups)
• 1/2 cup Orange Juice
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tsp. salt
• Juice of 1/8 lemon
• Juice of 1/8 lime

Couldn’t be any simpler really. Just measure and mix everything.

I squeezed the juice from the fruit and then left the pieces in the liquid to further add some flavor. It actually made a surprisingly big difference in taste after they had sat in there a few hours.

The main change I want to make for the next batch is to (at least) double the amount of orange juice. The flavor of the juice got a bit lost among the other fruit.

Let’s compare prices and see where my version really outperforms Gatorade (pun intended).

Lime – $0.34

Lemon – $0.59

Orange juice – $1.79

Water, salt, sugar – all basically zero cost in the amounts they are used here.

I used 1/8 of the lime and lemon and around 1/10 of the juice.

That means this recipe costs around $0.30 per 2 quart batch.

(I rounded up even!) It contains all the important nutritional elements of Gatorade, while excluding the red 40, glycerol ester of rosin and “natural flavor.”

I plan to keep on experimenting with it and try other flavors and variations.

Have you tried making your own Gatorade?