My homemade plum liquor

Inspired by the most amazing plum harvest and a recipe for Italian liquor Bargnolino, a plum liquor from Parma ( just like the ham and the cheese) I made some plum liquor. We have two beautiful plum trees in our garden and the liquor was just one of the many plum products we produced this year.




I found a very simple recipe to make Bargnolino and I was finally able to make my own version of Plum Liquor. I love fruity and nutty liquors and we drink liquors quite often and currently my favorite is Disaronno another Italian liquor and maybe for this reason I can say I normally prefer Italian liquors to French ones.

However, my greatest inspiration are the Brazilian fruit liquors made with cachaça such as graviola , jabuticaba , pitanga and genipapo which are as old as the first cachaças which were first marketed in the first half of the 16th century.



The Italian recipe asked for pure alcohol but I prefer more flavored drink and I used cachaça which is perfect for liquors as, depending on the type of cachaça used, it also add a subtle or even strong flavor of sugar cane on the end. I just love cachaça based liquors and I hope this one will be the perfect one for me. Now I have to wait until the end of December, shaking the my jars every week to make sure the liquor gets the best out of the plums and the sugar...



Plum liquor
Inspired by the liquor Bargnolino

Version 1:

1 Kg of small sloe plums
450 grams of sugar
500 ml of pure cachaça
3 freshly emptied vanilla pods


How:

Sterilize two jars with one liter capacity or one big jars with two liters capacity by boiling the jars for 10 minutes. Wash the lids and dip them in boiling water and set them aside. The jars must have 2 liters or 1 liter capacity.

Place the fruits in the jars filling the jar up the top but don't overcrowd it, leave 2-3 cms from the top. Place the open deseeded vanilla beans between the fruits. Add the sugar over the fruits and vanilla beans (seeds). Fill the jars with cachaça, just enough to cover the fruits. Close the jar without pressing and let the mixture set in a dark, dry spot in your kitchen for 90 days. You will have to shake the mixture everyday during the first week and once a week during until the end of the 90 days. The shaking is very important to help the integration of sugar and alcohol in the mixture.

After the 90 days of infusion you must filter the drink through a clean and boiled cheese cloth and with the help of a funnel transfer the drink to a clean glass or divide it among smaller washed, boiled and dried jars. Makes around 700ml of liquor.

The liquor can be kept closed for long periods of time but the exact time depends on the conditions of production, storage and bottling.



Obs. 1 The final amount of alcohol needed to fill the jars will depend on the amount of sugar and fruit you have used. It may vary according to the form of jar and your preference for sugar...

Obs. 2 You can use pure alcohol but if you are in Brazil use the best organic cachaça you can find...

Obs. 3 In December I will return to show my liquor...

Obs. 4 There are thousands of ways to make liquors at home and you can use any type of alcoholic beverage to make liquor, choose the one you like best and just go for it...