Chill Lemon

Limoncello has become very popular in recent years. You can buy a bottle of yellow liquid for as little as €8 at the supermarket, but that won't have seen a single lemon. You also increasingly hear of people making their own limoncello by steeping some zest in industrial alcohol. That's certainly already an improvement. And then there's how we do it. We distill our own alcohol from bran and sugar. And then we organize a peeling day: 40 kilos of fresh early lemons from the Vallei van Geluk directly imported from Spain. Just take a look at their website: they 'rescue' citrus fruit from old, unsprayed orchards. The latter is super important, because it's all about the peel, which must be perfectly fresh and chemical-free. And then the trick is to peel it paper-thin, to only get the oily cells and not the bitter white part. We do that with a truffle slicer, because a regular peeler is much too thick. By the way, we make lemonade syrup from the peeled lemons; we really want to use everything. We let the zest macerate, or steep, in the dark for about eight weeks. A little sugar added, not too much. Now you can taste real limoncello (30%), which is delicious chilled, but you can taste it even better at room temperature.