How to Make Homemade Gatorade

But it turns out, an electrolyte drink doesn’t have to be complicated (or bright blue) to do what it’s intended for: replenish fluids and electrolytes lost during intense exercise. 

During development for our cookbook, Everyday Athlete, we happily discovered that you can make flavorful homemade Gatorade recipes with just four ingredients—and you likely already have two on hand.

You may think that water is your best bet for hydration, but sports drinks (such as Gatorade) are doing a lot more heavy lifting hydration-wise. When exercising, you need more than just water.

Not just Gatorade, but the essential components of any sports drink are pretty simple. You need just three things.

1. Water for hydration.
2. Sodium to replenish electrolytes. (Other electrolytes such as magnesium, potassium, and calcium are lost in much smaller amounts and are generally best obtained through a healthy diet.)
3. Carbohydrates to provide fuel for extended exercise.

In our recipe, table salt took care of sodium while granulated sugar checked the carbohydrate box.

But a mixture of just water, salt, and sugar alone isn’t going to taste very good. To add flavor, we relied on two key ingredients: freeze-dried fruit and citric acid.

While other recipes have been known to use coconut water or Kool-Aid powder, we love all-natural dried fruit.

We’ve utilized freeze-dried fruit’s concentrated “just-picked” fruitiness in everything from fruit-infused liqueurs to the best strawberry frosting. Here, it was the perfect way to provide intense fruity flavors and gorgeous colors while still being shelf-stable. 

Grinding the freeze-dried fruit into a fine powder in a blender or spice grinder allowed us to create a ready-to-use drink powder that would be available whenever we needed.

Powdered citric acid balanced the sweet and salty flavors of our drink. It’s also a useful ingredient to have on hand for many other uses (add a bit to your next batch of guacamole and you’ll never get brown guac again).

Mix it all together, and you’ve created a ready-to-use sports drink powder that is as functional as it is flavorful. Combine a scoop with water, and shake for instant, and delicious, refreshment.