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Italian folk liqueur limoncello is not only possible, but even necessary to cook at home. Making limoncello with your own hands is more than simple. At the same time, no one will prevent you from adjusting the strength and sweetness of the drink to your own taste. In addition, you will be completely sure that it does not contain various preservatives and emulsifiers, as a rule, used by industrial manufacturers.
Learn more about limoncello.
Tips before starting
For limoncello, undiluted alcohol is best (ideally, of course, grape alcohol, although, in principle, grain alcohol will do). Actually, in Southern Italy, in the small homeland of the drink, only the aforementioned substance is used.
Other culinary and distillery sites offer recipes for limoncello with vodka and moonshine, but it will be much more difficult to bring them to life.
In the first case, either you will have to significantly reduce the strength of the drink, using the amount of water calculated for pure alcohol, or significantly reduce the volume of the latter, as a result of which you will have to cook a thick syrup that is quite difficult to prepare, which, moreover, will be very difficult to mix with vodka base.
In the second case, you will have to take care of the quality of homemade distillate. The slightest presence of fusel oils in the used moonshine can irreversibly spoil the taste and smell of the future liquor.
Limoncello: the original recipe
To begin with, we will focus on how to make limoncello according to the most canonical recipe. As mentioned above, the amount of sugar and water can be varied according to your taste. If you follow the proportions given here, the output will be a liqueur, whose strength will be approximately 35-38 degrees, and the amount of sugar – 30 g per 100 ml of liquid, which in the case of a homemade variety of drink, is considered almost a classic.
List of ingredients
Ripe aromatic lemons – 1 kg
Food alcohol (95-96 degrees) – 500 ml
Drinking non-carbonated water – 650 ml
Sugars – 500 g
Method of preparation
Dip lemons in boiling water. Clean off the wax used for storing fruits with a vegetable brush or a dense, rough cloth.
Carefully remove the yellow part of the zest with a vegetable peeler (if a white subcortex gets into the drink, the liquor will be bitter).
Transfer the peel to a jar, pour in alcohol and close with a tight lid (peeled lemons can be safely used for other household purposes). Keep the container in a cool, dark place for a week, shaking it vigorously a couple of times a day.
Strain the alcohol through cheesecloth and squeeze the zest into it. Then, pour the zest with water and leave in this form for two hours. After that, carefully strain the water and use it to make syrup.
A syrup consisting of water and sugar can be prepared according to the classics: keep it on low heat until the crystals are completely dissolved, without bringing the substance to a boil; or you can boil it, vigilantly removing the foam (the second method will slightly increase the shelf life of your drink, ridding it of various unwanted microorganisms). Proportions and variants of sugar syrup can be found here.
Cool the resulting syrup to room temperature and mix with alcohol infusion (the turbidity of the drink will only indicate the absence of artificial emulsifiers in it). Strain the almost ready liquor and bottle it, then let it ripen for a week in the refrigerator, shaking the containers vigorously once a day. In the future, the drink should also be stored in the refrigerator.
creamy limoncello recipe
The main trick to preparing this drink is to use skimmed, maximum two percent natural (not powdered) milk, in order to avoid curdling upon contact with alcohol. If you believe some especially seasoned alco-makers, such milk can be completely painlessly mixed in a 1: 1 ratio with cream. But to be honest, I wouldn’t risk it.
List of ingredients
Lemons – 10 pcs.
Alcohol – 750 ml
Milk – 1,9 liter
Sugar – 1 kg
Vanilla – ½ pod (can be replaced with 20-30 g of vanilla sugar or 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract).
Method of preparation
Until the moment of straining the alcohol infusion and squeezing the zest, inclusive, you can follow the previous recipe.
Next, you should immediately discard the squeezed zest and start preparing the syrup, which includes: milk, granulated sugar and half a vanilla pod. At the same time, it is necessary to boil the milk over low heat until the sugar is completely dissolved.
After that, cool the syrup to room temperature, strain it and combine with the alcohol base, pouring lemon alcohol into the milk-sugar solution.
The result is very thoroughly mixed, filtered again and bottled without filling them to capacity.
Ready liquor is stored in the refrigerator for up to three months.
PS Some folk craftsmen suggest not to bother with syrup, but simply mix the alcohol base and a jar or two of condensed milk in a blender, adding vanilla sugar there. But consider that I did not tell you this.
A few final words
Over the 100 years of the existence of the liquor, several noteworthy modifications have appeared in its homeland, prepared according to the same principle. Among them:
Fragoncello – insists on chopped strawberries;
Meloncello – the pulp of cantaloupe melon is used;
fistacciocello – prepared using crushed pistachio kernels.
There is also a Sicilian limoncello made from oranges, more precisely – arancello. However, it is prepared in a slightly different way, respectively, it should be considered as a separate drink, although related to our liquor.
Relevance: 16.07.2017
Tags: Liqueurs, Pourings, Liqueurs, Recipes of liqueurs