The 4-Ingredient Soda Ina Garten Serves For Breakfast

The Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten, eats oatmeal every day for breakfast. But while she tends to adhere to a breakfast routine, Garten morning drink recipes are anything but boring. For a fun and delicious early-hours beverage, she recommends making a pomegranate fizz. This sweet yet tart soda presents a non-alcoholic alternative to a cocktail — and, as a bonus, only requires four ingredients. 

In her Food Network recipe for pomegranate breakfast soda, Garten calls a pomegranate fizz "so easy to make and so delicious" – not to mention good for you. To make the drink, Garten mixes roughly 1 and 1/3 cups of pomegranate juice with 2 and 1/2 cups of sparkling water, 2 tablespoons of fresh lime juice, and 1 tablespoon of sugar. That sugar works best in a superfine texture, as the smaller the sugar granules, the quicker and easier it will dissolve. Of course, if you need to scale those measurements up or down according to your group size, the ratio is generally 1/3 pomegranate juice to 2/3 sparkling water, says Garten.

While Garten only uses those four ingredients, you can treat her recipe as a launchpad and experiment with various substitutes and additions. Think other forms of citrus, flavored soda water, and a matching meal, and you'll give your breakfast an even greater boost. 

The simplicity of Garten's pomegranate soda means you can throw it together in a pinch — or tailor it to your own taste. If you're looking for a boozy brunch, try adding champagne in lieu of soda water. Or, if you don't have any limes on hand, swap them out entirely for other forms of citrus; lemon and orange offer a similar burst of brightness but with different flavor profiles. Alternatively, you can sweeten the deal by mixing in honey, or try adding some spice with cardamom syrup. The recipe proves a great baseline for flavors that range from the classic to the unique, so you can get creative. 

Likewise, you can up the ante of the ingredients you're already using. If you're a big fan of pomegranate, swap out Garten's standard soda water for a pomegranate-flavored San Pellegrino – or a soda water that's tinged with complementary flavors, such as blood orange. If that's still not enough fruit, go all-in on pomegranate by making a breakfast to match. Opt for a recipe that uses pomegranate molasses, such as pancakes drizzled with the sweet fruit-based syrup. You can order the flavored molasses on Amazon just as easily as you can incorporate the fruit into your morning meal. With Garten's drink on deck, your brunch will prove to be the opposite of a disaster.