Limoncello: POV Italian Cooking Episode 91

Welcome back to POV Italian cooking in association with Simply Good Food TV where today we're going to make limoncello. Now limoncello is really simple to make. Now it does require a little bit of patience but the only ingredients you need are a good high proof alcohol, lemons, sugar, water, and if you're making the creamy limoncello you'll need some milk as well. Now in this video I'm going to show you how to make both the standard limoncello and the creamy limoncello. The history of limoncello is kind of a mix of both myth and legend but most folks agree that it was first developed around the early 1900s in southern Italy. There are three different regions in southern Italy that will take credit for the origin of limoncello. Those are Sorrento, Amalfi, and Capri. Now while those three regions do take credit for the origin of limoncello there was a businessman named Massimo Canale that registered limoncello as a trademark in 1988. Now this drink is typically used as a digestive and served very very cold typically with your dessert. I store mine in my freezer. Limoncello is used to make a couple different mixed drinks. I like to mix mine with a little bit of prosecco kind of thin it out a little bit because it can be a little bit strong but I have wasted enough of your time. Let's get started. So let's take a look at the ingredients for our limoncello and these are just going to be the ingredients for the first stage. I have 16 lemons. You want to use an organic lemon. Many times with non-organic lemons they'll coat them with wax or something else or they'll just get sprayed with bug spray. You don't want that in your limoncello. So second ingredient in our limoncello is straight grain alcohol or Everclear. This is the version that's 151 proof or 75.5% alcohol. This stuff cracks me up. If you actually look at the label it says caution extremely extremely flammable handle with care. Warning over consumption may endanger your health. Do not apply to open flame. Keep away from fire. Contents may ignite or explode. Do not consume in excessive quantities. Not intended for consumption unless mixed with non-alcoholic beverage. So more or less don't play with fire and don't drink this. This is the 1.5 liter bottle so it's essentially two 750 milliliter bottles. So if you have the standard bottle of Everclear you're going to only need eight lemons and you need a glass jar with a tight fitting lid which I have here. I actually found these half gallon canning jars that we're going to use. So the third ingredient in the first stage of making limoncello is patience. So let's just jump right in and get started. Now we want to get the peel off of our lemon but it's really important that you don't get the pith or the white part of your lemon peel because that'll make your limoncello bitter. Now I'm going to warn you up front this is the first time I've made limoncello so this could be really really bad or really really good. So I'm going to use a lemon peeler and this can be a little difficult because lemons can be tough. So you can see here I'm trying not to get the pith getting just a tiny little bit but just try not to get a lot of the pith if you can if you can avoid it. If you've got a sharp paring knife and good knife skills you may be able to get it but I'm going to stick with my lemon peel here. So all I'm going to do is peel all 16 lemons. Half of the lemon peel is going to go in one jar and the other half is going to go in the second jar. My beautiful wife helped me get the peels off of all 16 lemons, eight in each jar. So now all I'm going to do is take my Everclear and pour half of it in each jar and it goes a little slow because of this little plastic doo-woppy on the top and yes that's a technical term doo-woppy. So we're going to get that off because we don't want to do a slow pour we want to do a nice fast one. Glug glug glug goes the booze goes the booze. So now all we do is put our lids on our jars nice and tight and I'm going to set these jars in a down in my basement. You don't want to set them in direct sunlight set them somewhere cool somewhere where there's a no sunlight will get to them and they're just going to sit for two weeks. So in two weeks we'll be back and we'll do the second part of the second part of our limoncello. Now in the first segment I said I was going to let the lemon peels macerate or soak in the Everclear for two weeks. Well I did some reading looking at different recipes for limoncello kind of felt that longer was better so I ended up letting this go for a month in my basement nice dark corner. So the ingredients for our second step is a simple syrup. Now the simple syrup I went ahead and made it because it needed to cool down but it's real simple to make it's four cups of water three cups of sugar which is about 685 grams of sugar. You heat it up on your stove whisk it together and bring it to just a boil make sure all of your sugar is dissolved and then you let it cool down. So the first thing we want to do for our clear limoncello is filter off our lemon peels. So what I'm going to do here is pour this through my sieve you can see that that Everclear is nice and yellow. So now what I'm going to do this bowl unfortunately is not large enough for me to pour all of my simple syrup in but my simple syrup I'm going to go ahead and pour it in this bowl again four cups of water three cups of sugar so all I got to do is make sure I get these mixed together real well so I'm going to pour this in and you can see when I pour it in it gets a little bit cloudy immediately and that's what we want to see. Let me grab a spoon you do not want to use a metal spoon for this to get everything stirred up I'm just going to use this nice small plastic spoon we just want to get this mixed together. I'll tell you the smell is very very strong get the smell nice smell of lemon. I've got two different bottle sizes just because I'm going to make some larger bottles and some smaller bottles so now what I'm going to do if I can do this without making too much of a mess this ought to be fun I like this bowl because it's got the nice pour spout it's going to make this next step easy so I'm going to pour a little bit of this back in there got almost all of it look at that and now all I'm going to do using my nice little funnel is I'm just going to bottle up my limoncello leave a little bit of breathing room here at the top that's probably just a bit too much I don't want it to be up the neck perfect that's about where I want so I'm going to go ahead and do a big bottle I love these big bottles because they got this nice rubber stoppers on let that come up right under the neck perfect what I'm going to do is go ahead and finish bottling my clear limoncello so what I'm going to go ahead and do is get my caps on these bottles of course this one I have to kind of figure out how to cap it because I don't really know I'm going to go ahead and get these bottled and get them out of the way and we're going to make our creamy limoncello so now let's start on our creamy limoncello first thing I'm going to do here is filter off my everclear now for my simple syrup for my creamy limoncello what we have is um it's it's made with two percent milk four cups of two percent milk and three cups of sugar and three teaspoons of vanilla heat it up just like you did your regular simple syrup and let it cool to room temperature so we've got that ready so all I'm going to do take the same bowl I had before pour my two percent milk simple syrup into my large bowl there back here out of the way pour my wonderful smelling lemon liqueur right into my bowl we're just going to get this mixed up now you know what I'm going to need this bowl I don't know why I'm so quick to move it out of the way oh my gosh this smells so good my good friend chef Nicola makes the best limoncello um and he's he's asked me to bring mine in to see see how I stand up to his now this creamy limoncello his creamy is my favorite this smells really really good it smells very close to what he does but we'll just have to just have to wait and see all right so I'm going to pour a little bit of this right back into my bowl here with my four spout just because I want to make it easier move this over here a little bit out of the way and let's start bottling just going to take my funnel we're going to leave some room probably maybe even a little bit more room now probably about the same as the other bottles because this has milk in it we have to store it in the refrigerator or the freezer so we got to leave you some expansion room that's about as full as I'm going to fill these bottles so all I'm going to do is continue to fill each bottle let's get our bigger one right here I'm real excited about this can't wait get this one filled up these little rubber funnels are so handy they fit in the drawer real easy very very very useful fill this one right up to the bottom of the neck so it's got a lot of expansion room and move on to my next bottle I finished bottling my creamy limoncello and I'm not going to do a tasting today because it needs time this needs to sit the standard limoncello I'm going to put in a box put it down in my basement in a nice dark cool corner for one month it's got to set you got to give it that time to finish now we can't do this with the creamy limoncello we don't want to let it sit out because it's got milk in it and quite honestly be very rancid by the time we got around to tasting it what I'm going to do with my creamy limoncello is I'm going to put it all in my refrigerator for a couple days kind of just let it rest and then I'm going to put everything in my freezer in a month we're going to come back and try our limoncello limoncello is a great summer drink so we have this wonderful patio out back and looking forward to having some of this with my wife in the evening so it's time to try our limoncello if you remember we made a creamy limoncello and a standard limoncello and I've been storing these in my freezer they won't freeze solid limoncello is perfect for summer I'm trying to move these away from the fire because I don't want to go up in flames here let's try our creamy limoncello first for a nice little shot into our glass fire keeps going out I'm going to leave it out this time that way I don't go up in flames so now we can come back here in the center creamy limoncello as you can see nice and milky looking it's good got a little kick to it but that's pretty good I like that it's definitely got some kick I might next batch I make I'll probably go with another cup of the another cup of milk and another cup of the sugar or three-quarter cup of sugar kind of thin that up a little more still a little strong let's try our standard limoncello I'm going to go with a shot of that you can see a couple folks have already tried my my standard limoncello definitely got that nice lemony smell and now you can see it's not completely clear a little bit cloudy that's okay it's good that's got a kick to it that needs about another two cups of simple syrup but that's limoncello it's definitely got the limoncello taste it's just that straight grain alcohol that ever clear it's so strong you gotta add a little bit more simple sugar and limoncello is great the great thing about making limoncello is you can make it yours you know I play with the ingredients add more milk add more vanilla add more simple syrup to get it right where you want it for your palate but this is definitely relatively simple and something you can make at home and to let you know I like I've had so much fun making it I already have a second batch of brewing so thanks a lot for watching POV Italian Cooking don't forget to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google Plus. 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