You Can Sous Vide a Custom Liqueur in Just a Few Hours
Hello friends and welcome back toWill It Sous Vide? , the column where I usually do whatever you want with my immersion circulator. Today we take a break from chewing and harness the power of sous vide to make a bespoke liqueur in record time.
Making liqueurs with individual flavors has never been so difficult; you simply add the flavored ingredients to vodka or other holy spirit and let it hang until the ethanol is completely infused, then mix it with syrup to sweeten and thin it. It’s a simple process that requires a little shaking on your part at best, but it can take weeks to reach your desired endpoint. Using sous-vide mode cuts this down to hours .
This is great for several reasons: not only do you have time to eat your creation earlier, but if you don’t like it, you haven’t waited days and days just to get frustrated with a recipe that might require some tweaking. You can also drink small batches of liqueur at a time and, once you determine the proportions and taste, increase it. This is what I did with my ginger limoncello, a liqueur that I have played with from time to time since I bought Anova a couple of Christmas days ago.
There’s nothing wrong with regular lemon-infused limoncello, but it can sometimes seem a little cloying and monotonous. It’s also an easy summer, and as we descend deeper and deeper into the fall, I wanted a little spice to balance the situation. Ginger is a natural pairing for lemons and I really love it. To make lemon ginger liqueur, you will need:
- 375 milliliters of vodka
- 6 lemons, preferably organic or unwaxed if you find them
- 30 ounces grated fresh ginger
- 1 cup sugar (I like turbinado. Your liquor won’t be as yellow, but I prefer a deeper sweetness.)
Wash and peel the lemons to the best of your ability, being careful not to pick up too much of the bitter pith with the skin. Toss the peel and ginger into the pitcher, pour in all 375 ml of vodka, and close the jar.
Place the jar in a bath with suvid at 135 degrees and leave for two hours. (I forgot to take a picture of the jar in the tub, but I think we all already know what it looks like: a jar of something in a bucket of water.)
At some point during those two hours, you will want to make a syrup. Instead of dealing with a measuring glass, I simply fill the original vodka bottle with water as we are trying to dilute the alcohol content by about half. Pour water into a saucepan, bring it to a boil and dissolve a cup of turbinado sugar in it to create a syrup ratio of about 1: 1.5.
When the vodka is infused, strain all parts of the plant and let the syrup and syrup cool slightly before combining them into one large bottle. Place this bottle in the refrigerator until the liquor cools, then pour yourself a jigger.
So now we have to ask ourselves: would you like the custom sous vide lemon liqueur?
Answer? Yes, of course, and not bad. This liquor is pretty good too, if I say so. It’s sweet and savory and can be used as an after-dinner dessert or mixed with a cocktail. You can also simply dilute it with soda water to make an alcoholic lemon-ginger soda, which I am going to do when this week is over.
But there is no reason to give up these tastes. Lemons are great, but what about other citrus fruits? Grapefruit liqueur makes a nice bittersweet addition to your bar cart, but you can also go crazy and combine any citrus fruits you want. There is also no reason why you need to stick to ginger. Lemongrass, makroot lime leaves and fresh herbs can be used to create a liqueur as unique as your taste. Keep in mind, however, that not everything will be extracted at the same rate, so add more delicate ingredients such as soft leafy foods towards the end of the 2 hour extraction time. Work in small batches to test your tastes, then scale up as you refine your recipe. If things don’t go well the first time around, don’t be discouraged. It only took you a couple of hours, and there are many hours in a day.