Hi, I’m Clicky here with Nacho tornado microwave. Today I’m going to make some limoncello, and yes I mean today, not this month. Coo says that spring and the beginning of Summer is the time to prune our myer lemon tree so I’ve got to use a ton of lemons, fast. I love myer lemons because they fruit year round and they’ve got this slightly orange color to the skin. They think it was a cross between a sour orange and a lemon. Anyway, we’re having some friends over tonight and one of them really loves lemon drop cocktails, so I think I’m going to try making a lemondrop using limoncello. If you aren’t familiar with limoncello, it’s a really lovely digestif made in Italy. It’s got a refreshing lemon flavor and is traditionally sipped after a nice meal. I suspect some of you out there who are familiar with this might be confused. Limoncello usually takes weeks to make, you have to soak the lemon rind in alcohol forever. Well I read about using a sous vide immersion bath to significantly speed up the extraction from the lemon peel and I’ve made limoncello a bunch of times using the traditional method and a few times using this method and I think it’s just as good. 

Now what do you need to make limoncello? Well lemons of course, if you’re buying lemons, this is the time to go organic. Regular lemons can have a wax on the peel that you don’t really want in this application. You’ll also need some high proof, neutral flavored alcohol, the higher proof the better. In California, I think the best we can get is 120 proof everclear but other places can do better. Don’t worry, we’re going to get it back down to a more drinkable level. If you can’t find that, you can absolutely use one hundred proof vodka, but your final product will have a little less kick. Later on we’re going to need sugar and water. That’s it! Well aside from the immersion circulator I guess. But if you don’t have one of those, just substitute a couple of weeks. 

This process is dead simple though it can be a bit tedious. I’m going to pick and wash these lemons, I’ve got about 1.5 liters of everclear to use, so I’m going to get about 15 lemons. I think about 1 lemon per one hundred ml of liquor is the right ratio. Once we’ve got the lemons all washed we need to get the lemon zest. I’ve used a couple of different methods for this over the years. A microplaner works really well but can take quite a while, probably because I get a little obsessive about getting EVERY LAST BIT. Nothing against microplaners, but in this case, a standard issue potato peeler should do the trick. Try to avoid getting too much pith when zesting, but don’t worry about being perfect. A very little bit actually gives the limoncello some character, or so I tell myself. What do we do with all of these lemons that are going to go bad now because they have no skin? We like to juice them all and pour them into an ice cube tray, freeze that and we can put the lemon ice cubes into a bag for easy storage. Not that we need more lemon juice around here, I pulled the screen out of this window so I can just reach out and grab a lemon any time I want but whatever.

In the past I would pour all of my everclear into big freezer bags and seal them up, but it always felt a little bit precarious having a big overfull bag floating around in the water bath. Today I’m going to try something I haven’t done before and use mason jars. I don’t see why it won’t work, but you’ll get to find out with me, we’ll see. Divide up the zest roughly equally among the mason jars and fill with the everclear.

I’m going to put the mason jars in my tub here and fill it with water almost up to their lids and then set my sous vide, I’ve got a trusty anova that I’ve had for years, to 135F, that’s 57C and let this go for about 3 hours, I might even go for 4 hours. The added heat supercharges the extraction process of all those alcohol soluble flavors in the lemon peel. And we’re all sealed up here, so the alcohol won’t evaporate away.

Once we’re out of the bath, I like to give it a tiny taste to see how the extraction level is. You can see by the color, we definitely got a lot, but I want to check anyway to see if we need to go farther. Yep, that’s good, whoo, strong! Strain it into a bowl and Now we just mix it with a simple syrup. I like to target 60-80 proof for my final limoncello, so math math math, I want to add half of the volume of my original everclear. I measured that, and it was 1600ml so I need 800ml of simple syrup. Note, this is significantly less syrup than most recipes use, but we like our limoncello less sweet than most folks. Adjust to your own liking. To make the simple syrup is uhh simple. Just combine equal parts (I’m a nerd so I’m doing this by weight) sugar and water in a sauce pan. Heat over medium heat and whisk until everything’s fully dissolved. I’m going to make more syrup than I need, it’s good to have around for cocktails, and I might want to dilute more depending on how things taste at the end. Now this part is cool, we have one clear liquid and another clear liquid. When I pour them together, cloudy! Chemistry is fun. This is your final limoncello so give it a taste, see if you need to adjust things, then toss it in some bottles. Or you can pour it back in those mason jars. It’s best served chilled, but it’s safe to store at room temp, so we just keep one bottle for pouring in the freezer. I like to keep the simple syrup in a squeeze bottle for easy access. In a future video, we might want to talk about some fun garden flavors you can infuse into simple syrups for cocktails or even just spicing up some soda water.

What to do with it? Well I’m going to try making lemondrops tonight. I’m thinking 2 oz limoncello, half an ounce of cointreau, and some lemon juice and some left over simple syrup to taste. Usually we just have it by itself. A guilty pleasure is to put on an episode of Stanley Tucci’s italy show and have a glass. I hope you’ll give that a try, or at least that you enjoyed learning about using temperature to speed up extracting flavor with alcohol. Do the things with the buttons. I’m Clicky, Nacho and Freya are somewhere around here. And as Coo says, go get your hands dirty, but maybe wash them before you do this one.