Limoncello Recipe

We’re still trying to preserve, juice and munch our way through the windfall of free citrus fruit.

After much deliberation, day dreaming, book-reading and internet browsing,  I decided to designate 17 lemons and 20 oranges to the ‘limoncello‘ treatment.  We have started the process of making limoncello liqueur and arancello liqueur.  We still have 89 days to wait till we find out whether both were successful.  At that time I’ll let you know.

But for now, if you have lots of citrus fruit to use here is the recipe for homemade limoncello liqueur:

Homemade Limoncello Recipe

Notes: This recipe is an amalgamation of lots of different methods and quantities.  You can add more sugar or less water and get a sweeter, thicker liqueur.  You can wait longer and hopefully get an even smoother drink or you can be impatient and get something tasty but not quite so delicate!  I’ve used 37.5 %ABV (75% proof) vodka.  According to most recipes this is the minimum alcohol content required so if you can, use a higher proof product.  Eau de Vie would be good and probably more authentic but vodka is cheap here!

Ingredients: 17 lemons, 2 70cl bottles of vodka, 700g white sugar, 750ml water.

Method:

1. Wash the fruit in warm water.  If they are bought fruit you may need to scrub to remove all the wax and any pesticides used in their production.  If you can, use organic unwaxed fruit.
2. Remove the zest from all the lemons.  You do not want any of the white pith so I would recommend using a good quality zester like my Microplane Grater/Zester (thankyou K it was really efficient!) which is so sharp you don’t need to apply any pressure.  The pith is not wanted as it would impart its bitter flavour into the alcohol.
3. Put all the zest into a large jar (at least 2.5 litre capacity) and top up with the alcohol.
4. Leave for 45 days!  The alcohol should be somewhere dark but not too cold.  You can give the jars a shake every so often.  This part of the process is to allow the alcohol to absorb the lemony oils from the zest.
5. On day 45 make up a sugar syrup by dissolving the sugar slowly in the water then boiling for 5 minutes.
6. Once the syrup has cooled completely add to the jar of limoncello and mix it all together.
7. Leave for another 45 days!
8. At day 90 or thereabouts filter the mixture using a muslin cloth, jelly bag or coffee filter papers.  This chap who is investigating all things limoncello related recommends filtering at least 4 times, but many don’t go quite that far.
9. Bottle the finished limoncello liqueur and store in the dark.  One bottle should be put in the freezer to cool.
10. Drink neat and ice cold.

Well all I can say is roll on May when we can taste this batch!  I’ve also made a batch of Arancello which is the same thing but made with oranges.  We used 25 oranges as their zest never seems as strong as that of lemons.

Updated – After a serious amount of taste-testing (not too much of a hardship we came to two conclusions:

• We felt the orange limoncello was a tad on the medicinal side and won’t be making it again.
  
• But, rest assured the lemon Limoncello was fabulous and definitely a recipe worth repeating!

Make sure you label the jars so you can keep track of when you started the process.  There are quicker recipes for making limoncello liqueur but it seems the longer you wait, the mellower the taste.  I’m using the slow method in a bid to make a top quality product.

For a more self sufficient future

If you find our site helpful why not make your Amazon purchases through our US link or our UK Amazon links? It costs you nothing more and means we can buy a new pair of Boots!