The Making of Limoncello

It was early 1900 at a boarding house on the island of Azzurra. The lady Maria Antonia Farace raised a garden of lemons while her nephew became the proud owner of a post-war bar in the same area. Using what they said was a recipe handed down through their family, they began offering complimentary shot glasses of a daring, brightly colored lemon liqueur they called Limoncello. After dinner, the travelers would sip what Maria called a “digestivo,” and the word of the delicious lemon drink soon spread across Capri.

Or wait! Perhaps it was Vincenza Canale and his Inn with those travelers! The truth is, the history of Limoncello is as varied as the people it comes from. Sorrento, Amalfi, Capri…it doesn’t matter the location, they all have similar stories and legends of it’s mixed and varied history and perhaps they are all correct. Whosever grandma originally bottled the stuff is a mystery and will likely always stay that way. The good news is…we have it to make for ourselves, and that’s what I want to talk about.

Limoncello is an incredibly smooth, sweet, delicious drink that is meant to be sipped with dessert after dinner from tall thin shot glasses. It is particularly good with Italian desserts, but drinking it with any kind of chocolate dessert will pair very well too. Making it is quite simple, though all you really need is time and patience. I started my first batch last night, and it was fairly time consuming but not hard. I’m going to tell you how to get your first batch started as well.

You’ll need some items to get started. Here, I’ve purchased two glass jars with seal rims. They were $6.99 each from Cost Plus World Market. Sun tea jars work well too, but stay away from plastic jars or jars that had something in them previously that wasn’t limoncello. You’re going to be letting this sit for 4 months, any residue that is left over is going to taint your limoncello.

I’m only making one batch right now, but my second jar is going to be started next month and will be a double batch for Christmas. Limoncello makes an excellent Christmas present when given in beautiful little sealed jars with personalized tags. Cost Plus World Market has many wonderful sized jars that work well for this.

 

Next you will need the alcohol. Here’s where things get a little controversial. Everyone who makes Limoncello has an opinion about what kind of alcohol to use. Some will die saying you can only use Vodka. Others will decry heaven saying that you must use Everclear grain alcohol or go home, heathen. They are both right, in a way. Traditionally, the drink was made with grain alcohol…OR Vodka. But the Vodka at the time was not quite so commercialized and low proof. Limoncello is meant to be kept in the freezer, and these days, Vodka will freeze, at least partially, in the freezer if it isn’t high enough proof. And if it is high enough proof, it is made with potatoes which will change the taste of your Limoncello! The best way to make this drink is by using BOTH alcohols. You don’t need a super high end Vodka, Smirnoff works well, which is what I’ve been recommended to use. These two bottles together cost a little less than $30.

 

You’re also going to need lemons! You’re also going to need a vegetable brush of some kind to clean them and a good vegetable/fruit cleaner. Commercial lemons, no matter how organic, come to you covered in a wax and chemicals which keep the lemons looking their brightest and best the longest. You have to get that crud off. The trouble is you can’t really see this stuff, so you’re just going to have to scrub them well and use the vegetable cleaner, it’ll help. Scrubscrubscrub, you don’t want that junk in your drink.

Also, beware of Sunkist lemons. I didn’t realize that Sunkist stamps their lemons with a green stamp that is harder than hell to scrub off. Fortunately, I only bought 5 of that kind. How many lemons do you need? Well, that’s also a good controversy. Some say you need 10 for one batch, or 15, or 20. And they should be organic. I have 15 organic lemons, and 5 non-organic because the organic lemons were pretty small with thin skins. Here’s a quick lemon lesson: The lemons you can buy in the store are nothing like the lemons you buy on the Amalfi coast from roadside vendors that are used to make traditional limoncello. You’ll never get limoncello like they do because their lemons are just better for it. They have super thick skins that have a high level of lemony oil in them. Our skins are very thin. So I’ll say 20 is better, but if you can get good sized lemons with good thick skins, 15 will work too. I think 10 is probably not enough.

After you scrub your lemons clean, it’s time to peel them. I used a potato peeler, but you can use a knife if you want to, though I don’t recommend it unless you are very good at using it. The potato peeler will make sure you don’t dig too deep into the skin when you are removing the lemony outer skin. Beneath the yellow skin is a white substance called the Pith. The Pith is very, very bitter and you want as little of it in your limoncello as possible. It’ll alter your limoncello making it bitter, and no one wants that. So using your potato peeler, remove the yellow skin without getting the white stuff. Any white stuff that sticks to your skin, use a knife to scrape it off. This is the time consuming part, but you want it done as good as possible.

Here’s another controversial subject to talk about. Some people say peel it, others say zest it. Anyone who says you should zest it is an idiot. A lot of the oil is going to stick to your microplane as you zest, for one, and you want it all to go into your drink. For two, zest is so tiny and broken apart that filtering it all out is going to be time consuming and you may never get it all out and you don’t want anything grainy in your finished product. Save yourself time and heartache and just peel it. The bigger the slice the better.

 

Here’s what you’ll have when you’re done with all that. You can already see the alcohol turning yellow. This is only 1 batch, though next time I”m going to make a double batch and fill the bottle.

Here’s where it gets fun. Make a label or a tag to throw around the neck of the jar that tells you want date you made it and what date it will be done. From the day you make the jar, count of 4 months. That’s when it’ll be ready for the next step.

Four months?!?!?! Yes my friends, four months. Honestly, if you could leave it alone for a year, that’d be even better. This is definitely a drink that gets better and better with time. Anyone who tells you it will be ready in two weeks or two months is, well, being honest, but they are mislead. You could have it ready in 2 weeks or 2 months, but it isn’t going to be very good, it’s definitely not going to be authentic, and you might as well go buy a commercial bottle of limoncello, that’s about what you’re getting. Trust me, put it away for 4 months. Do it. Don’t open it before 4 months. Every day or every couple of days, give the bottle a good swish to move the alcohol around and re disperse it. If you can keep it in a cool dark place in your basement, that’s best. But if you’re like me, you don’t have a cool dark basement in the summer and you will need to keep it in your fridge. Some say you shouldn’t keep it cold, and maybe you shouldn’t, but cold is preferable to hot which is what it would be in my basement. Oh if only I were blessed with a root cellar.

In 4 months you’re going to pull it out, scoop out the lemon pieces with a slotted spoon, and start filtering the drink with a funnel and some coffee filters. You’re going to filter it with about 6 coffee filters (wetting the filters first before pouring the alcohol through) You should get everything out of the drink leaving it a lovely uniform shade of yellow. You’re going to make a syrup with 6 cups of sugar and 5 cups of water which will be added to the alcohol and set aside at room temperature for about a week or two. Then…well then it’ll be ready to bottle. I’ll have some large bottles that go into my freezer for every day drinking, and I’ll probably bottle a couple of small bottles for friends and family to try.

Drink responsibly! This stuff is strong! Sip it slowly, don’t drink a lot of it at a time, enjoy it with dessert. If you’re under 21, you’re not even allowed so just move on.

When 4 months comes, we’ll return to this subject and I’ll show you the pictures of how I make the syrup.

Storm of the Century

If you’ve been even remotely watching the news recently, you no doubt know about (or are personally experiencing) the flooding in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, etc. Living in the Midwest is a very peculiar thing. Sometimes we look so urban, so suburban, so much like everyone else. And other times…well we just aren’t. There’s something still very pioneering, weathered, and tough about us. We know the weather. Since I was a little girl, I could smell a thunderstorm, understand the clouds, know the sound of dangerous weather. We know what to do and how to do it, and for the most part we always weather our yearly bought of storms. I suspect it is not unlike how others weather hurricanes and the like. You grow up knowing what to do when the wind howls harder than it has any right to, and the water is coming down faster than you know the ground can absorb. You just know how to keep yourself safe.

But we are helpless to protect anything but ourselves. Our houses, our fields, our farms, our land. They are at the mercy of the storms. During my first storm since putting in a garden, I posted here asking for advice, practically desperate, sure I was going to lose everything, cringing and pacing at the doorways and jumping with each “thunk” of hail that struck a window pane. I was so sure I was going to lose my whole garden…but there it was when it was all over. Hardly a scratch on them. In fact in the days that followed that storm, they sprung to life magically. I was lucky. Others were not. Not far from where I live…less suburban but still not a far drive, whole fields are still under water with a crop sinking slowly into mushy soil.  My dad’s house, in the middle of the country, survived the storms, but his land at the bottom of his hill was nothing but a newly grown lake, swamping the driveway and anything else that might have been planted there. It’s absolutely devastating watching what’s going on with people who have giant farms and endless rows of crops. Gone. It’s sobering and makes me proud and thankful of my little dirt mound in the backyard.

Anyway, I do have a point to this post, not just shock and awe. As you probably know, the Midwest got sucker punched by dozens of storms over a two week period. Every day I was running home to batten down the hatches. More that one night was spent with my husband huddled under a large table in the basement while I watched a fuzzy TV after the cable went out and my husband read a book and waited it out. On one evening, well into the stormiest week I can remember in many years, my friend and I were sitting in my library watching a TV show on the computer. My husband was out, and it was supposed to be the first clear night for a while. Suddenly, we heard thunder and having not expected it, we quickly ran to the back door and out onto my deck to see if it really did look like another storm was coming in. God knows we didn’t need it.

What we saw was more than amazing. And scary. And beautiful. I, of course, had to take pictures, though it took me a week to get them posted finally. Most of the storms came in the night, like little wet bandits. This one was coming just on the cusp of nightfall when we still had a glow in the sky from the sun. Because of that, the sun lit up the sky like a fireball. It was absolutely incredible. Here are the pictures I took that night. Mother nature is incredibly beautiful, even when she is at her most destructive.

I hope you like them. They aren’t Photoshopped at all. This is how the sky looked, just like a painting.
-Sommer

New Art for a new girl

Oh my god! New art!

Sometimes I can’t believe it myself. I’ve been painting parts of the house so much and done so little creative art I sort of was starting to think I wasn’t going to go back. Then I had the bug to try acrylic painting, my new obsession, and off we went. The things I always wanted to achieve in watercolor but couldn’t I CAN easily with acrylic. Love love love Golden and all that it stands for. I have a 30% coupon for an item at Dick Blick and I’m honestly considering going and getting a package of mediums that add spice and love to any paint color. Mmmm. Art pr0n.

So here they are, in no particular order. They also are un-titled because I suck at titles. I just hate them. Feel free to come up with some for me.
There are 2 more, making it a set of six that will hang in the large expanse of open wall in our library. I haven’t finished the other two yet. They are sort of done but not done good enough. There are four more, larger canvases, that I’m going to start working on next that are going to go in the front foyer area by the door. They are long and narrow pieces that I’m excited to start. It’s been a long time since I worked on honest to God canvas and I love it so much. Watercolor canvas is disgustingly expensive.

Torandoes! Oh no!

The Midwest, my home, has been pummeled near to death in the past couple of weeks with storms. I’ve never been particularly afraid of storms or tornadoes, though I spend an awful lot of hand wringing hours worrying about my house, my yard, my garden, my deck, my dad’s house, my grandpa’s house, but never about lives being lost. I suppose that when you grow up with a particular threat you are so deeply trained how what to do you never worry about “making it through” only that your house doesn’t get imploded in the process. Tornadoes always seem to be more of a nuisance, a part-time villain instead of a mastermind.

In any case, there we were, husband and I, curled up beneath a table in our basement. I was watching tv, which was crackling and fuzzy after the cable went out, and the husband was reading a novel. Outside wind was howling, rain was trashing, the weather man was telling us to ignore the fact that the sirens weren’t going off and to get into the basement right away. The scare tactics reminded me of George Bush and his security threat colors. Did we ever get out of security threat orange? I forget now.

Many hours went by and when it was over, there was a lot of damage but not really to our area. Part of our downspout came off. Our little bell pepper plants went nuts with excitement and started sprouting peppers all over the place.

Iowa is flooding. I’m glad that I’m not in Iowa. I’m close but no water issues for me. I wonder what it would be like to watch water levels engulf my house.

I think I’d rather just have a tornado take it all in one fell swoop.

I love digging in the dirt.

Growing a garden is one of the most liberating things I’ve ever done. I think about it a lot, during the day and when I am at home. I go out every night and look at the leaves, and look at the ground. I look for bugs that might be helping or hurting my plants. I look for discoloration or spots. I want them to grow more. I will them to grow more.

The tomatoes have yellowing leaves, particularly my Brandywine, which isn’t surprising since it is an heirloom and not resistant to everything thanks to Science. I’ve been told it’s probably a nitrogen deficiency because of the very hard rains lately. I’m going to go pick up fish emulsion tonight at Menards to give a quick shot of nitrogen to the soil until the organic matter can catch up after our hard hard rains. That should put a stop to the yellowing problems.

We planted some carrot seeds, which we weren’t really sure would grow since we were a little late planting them. The seeds are tiny…I mean really tiny, so I imagined we’d have to thin them out since it was hard to carefully plant just one at a time along the row. I think the big storms that happened after we planted them blew them around. We’ve got *something* growing around the carrot bed, in the pathways and even one or two in the pepper bed. They do not look like grass, so I’m wondering if they are my baby carrots, but I don’t know. So they look like sort of a mess since most of them are in the pathway and not in the bed. Which means I have a large portion of my third bed that is empty. I’m going to pick something up to plant there. Not sure what yet. 

We’re also planting some strawberries in a container on our deck. I’m going to pick those up this week too. I think next year I want to plant a dwarf apple tree. 

On the same note, GM is shutting down it’s Hummer plants. Whoohoo! I feel bad for the people losing their jobs, of course, but I’m glad that we’ll stop seeing all the new hummers on the roads. And if you think people aren’t buying them anymore, I can tell you that someone in my building bought one this month. A brand new one. It makes me kind of sick. 

That is all!