No not that cello, you ninny. All the relatives of Limoncello. You know, yuzucello, orangecello, and so on and so forth. It’s all pretty easy but you will need a few choice tools and potent liquids in order to get the most out of this season’s citrus harvest–a zester, a big old glass jar, lots of high proof booze, and some patience because zesting can become somewhat tedious depending on your mindset. Sometimes these tasks are zen worthy and sometimes boring as hell.

If you don’t have high proof grain spirit the process will still work but it just won’t be as good as alcohol is a great solvent and sucks the flavor (and sometimes life) out of anything it comes in contact with. 80 proof vodka will be sufficient but it’s only 40% alcohol meaning it’s 60% water. We use 192 proof grain spirit now, so 96% alcohol, 4% water which makes an enormous difference. Not only does it take less time, but it also creates an insane amount of flavor. On another note, you also want to use organic fruit unless you want your ‘cello to taste like pesticides. Your choice.

Start by zesting whatever you have. This is a cara cara orange, one of my all time favorites next to the kumquat because it’s an orange with color and flavor. Sorry blood oranges…Both cara cara and the blood came about due to spontaneous mutations, pretty cool…It’s like a X Person, except their powers are to be tastier and prettier. Very L.A. Compared to the more popular blood orange, the cara cara is sweeter and less acidic and has a trace of sourness to it which is quite pleasant. I think the ‘cello will be very nice.

Zest away…

With the remaining cara cara oranges I cut away the pith to leave just the flesh. Yes, you’re not supposed to do this, but I did anyway. I could have juiced them I suppose and added the juice to the ‘cello. I thought about it, I did, but putting the flesh in will create less dilution while still providing more flavor. It’s a bit like making your own creme de pamplemousse liqueur but without the rose and additional spices.

And here we have it. Technically we can leave this for a day because there’s so much alcohol in there but I’ll leave it for a month because it looks nice as a decoration and the ‘cello tradition deems it so. I guess we’ll call it caracello?

Today marks a year to the day of blogging, this is post #355, but I still want to finish strong with 365 posts, a full year…So we’ll go for a little longer until the end. The countdown begins…