Apple & ginger soda; and cucumber, lime & sea salt!

This past rainy Saturday we had a visitor to our kitchen - Liza from Dirtyhandsny.com (a project through the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, about everything DIY in New York).  We took the opportunity to try out two totally new flavors - apple & ginger; and a cucumber based soda.  Also, this was our first time using our monster of a juicer - the Ruby 2000, which is now dominating one entire corner of our kitchen.

We juiced 5 green apples and a big chunk of ginger, to make about 900ml of liquid.  No sugar was added (the apples were sweet enough and we wanted to keep the tart nature of the green apples present).  The mixture was filtered and poured into our trusty soda siphons for carbonating.

The second soda we wanted to dry was inspired by the (hopefully) upcoming warm weather season.  We're huge fans of cocktails using cucumber and gin, and thought we would try to make our own mixer.  Again the Ruby 2000 made quick work of our 5 cucumbers, producing about 800ml of juice.  We tried again to use mint, but haven't figured out how to extract a fresh mint flavor without using huge piles of mint.  Even steeping mint in hot water didn't quite produce the effect we wanted - none of the really fresh mint flavor came through.  

So it was improvisation time - we rummaged through our fridge and realized we had a whole bag of limes.  We juiced 2 limes, then added the lime juice to the cucumber juice. The tartness of the limes is a great contrast to the mild, fresh cucumber juice.  

Lime zest was added to our simple syrup (1/4 cup of sugar), which was then added to the juice to balance out the lime juice. A tiny pinch of sea salt was added to bring out the all the individual flavors.