Here we are, have you ever been thinking to visit Viareggio and drink a Limoncello homemade, for example from your host? Do you know that you can make also Arancello using the same recipe (obviously changing the main ingredients) from lemons into oranges?
Well, we do that.
We usually offer some homemade liquor to our guest who decides to spend their holidays in Viareggio and stay by us.
We are so lucky to have an orange tree about 80 years old in our backyard. It went thru many stories, saw different families in that yard being the house about 100 years old. It recalls to my memories, my holidays in Viareggio when I was a child and my beloved grandfather was living in this house where we now live. We take good care of our orange tree and it gives us a marvellous perfume with its flowers in April and still produces wonderful sweet oranges for us.
Today I think that I can tell you which great satisfaction is to pick the oranges from our tree and transform them into something delicious you cannot buy.
Obviously, we need to start with some beautiful 100% bio oranges,
then we need to wash them. I usually do it with some warm water and peel them since for the liquor we only need their skin. Yes, you well understood only the skin of this fruit is used to make the Arancello liquor.
Only 4 ingredients, pure alcohol, oranges, sugar and water, and then you need a jar.
The best real flavours don’t need too many ingredients or processes.
Once you have peeled your 12/13 oranges for a litre of pure alcohol just put them together in a jar. The two ingredients have to stay together for 30 days and in those 30 days, you have only to remember to shake them every 3-4 days. You will see the colour of the alcohol changing in a beautiful orange colour.
Nothing of the oranges have to get lost, so what about a fresh full of vitamins orange juice to use for breakfast in the following days, or an orange cake, or some salmon cooked with an orange gravy?
Be careful the Arancello is not finished, after one month you need to boil one litre of water. Let it cool down a bit and add 700 gr of white sugar. The sugar has to melt into the water.
In the meantime filter the alcohol from the orange skin and throw away the skin, we don’t need it anymore.
Once the water with sugar is cold, add it to the alcohol in the jar. Leave the ingredients together for another 20 days.
Finally, your Arancello is ready to be put in nice bottles and cooled into the freezer. Your summer can start!
We are now ready to welcome our guest and friends, can’t wait to see our friends coming from Holland at the end of April for their holidays in Viareggio, spend some of the evenings under the orange tree drinking our Arancello after a lovely dinner.
Ah, I forgot! With the orange I made also an orange marmalade, I used also the skin of the oranges since they are bio, no pectin, no chemical additive, only orange and brown sugar. It took longer to be ready but it sorted out to be great, plaudit to myself and to our orange tree!
