3 Hour Sous Vide Limoncello

slice of lemons with sweet lemon alcoholic brandy

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3 Hour Sous Vide Limoncello

This Italian style aperitif is brightly lemony and packs an alcoholic punch! It's lovely served chilled and straight, or over ice with soda water. Limoncello is an excellent gift and a worthy thing to make when you have an abundance of lemons.

Prep Time20

Cook Time2

Course: Drinks, Food Gift

Cuisine: Italian

Keyword: limoncello, sous vide limoncello

Servings:

Calories: 699kcal

Ingredients

7 lemons unwaxed/organic
1 cup granulated sugar white sugar
2 cups vodka
1 cup water room temperature; filtered or boiled and cooled

US Customary - Metric

Instructions

Use a vegetable peeler or paring knife to cut away strips of the lemon zest, being careful to only take the outermost yellow part of the rind. Using the white pith will make your limoncello too bitter.
7 lemons
Combine the lemon rinds with the sugar in a large bowl, and gently crush them together with a wooden spoon or the end of a rolling pin, until all the rinds have been bruised and mixed with the sugar. Cover and let stand for 1 hour. At this point, the sugar should have extracted the oil from the rinds; they will look oily and glistening, and the sugar will have a texture like wet sand.
1 cup granulated sugar
Set your oven to Steam setting, 135°F/57°C (100% humidity).
Combine the vodka with the extracted lemon rinds and sugar in a large vacuum-sealer bag or a quart sized (1 litre) mason jar. Seal the bag or screw the lid onto the jar (fingertip tightness, not too tight!), and put into your preheated oven. Cook for 2 hours.
2 cups vodka
At the end of cooking, strain out the lemon peel and stir the water into the mixture, then decant into bottles.
1 cup water
Store limoncello in the refrigerator, where it will keep for at least 3 months.

Notes

Make sure you use unwaxed lemons for limoncello. If you use waxed supermarket lemons, the sugar and alcohol steeping will draw out the wax and make the finished product taste strange and have a cloudy appearance.
It's mentioned in the recipe but I'm doubling down here in the notes: don't put the white pith of the lemon peels into your limoncello. You just want the aromatic, oily yellow skin from the very outside of the lemons, or your liqueur will be very bitter.
Don't skip the muddling together of the sugar and lemon rinds. Bruising and mixing everything greatly speeds up the extraction of the lemon oils from the rind, which helps make this recipe much faster than a conventional home made limoncello.
You don't need the flesh/juice of the lemons for this recipe, but don't throw them away! I highly recommend steamed lemon curd to use up all that juice.

Nutrition