Homemade Orange and Lemon Extract

2 or 3 lemons (or 3 oranges)
Vodka to cover (or rum)
1 small mason jar and lid

1. Wash your lemons and oranges.

2. Get a very sharp little knife ready.

3. Have nice clean jars to put them into. Needs a nice screw on lid.

4. Peel, extremely thinly, 3 or 4 lemons (or 3 oranges). Place the peels into a mason jar as you are peeling them.

5. When you have all your peels in your jar, fill the jar with Vodka (or rum).

6. Secure the lid and give it a couple of shakes. This is important, you want to see if anything floats. Whatever floats completely to the top, you remove that piece of peel. It means you have left too much of the white part of the lemon or orange attached.

***I peel mine in short strips. Long strips tend to float to the top when maybe they don't have too much white left on them. So if you have along strip that is floating, tear the strip into smaller pieces. Give the jar another shake. This will either work completely and nothing now floats, or if a part of that strip did have had too much white left on it, that part only will float to the top so you can remove it.

7. You let your jars sit for 2 weeks, shaking them once or twice each day. At the end of 2 weeks, you remove all the peels from the jar and replace them with a fresh batch of peels. You let this sit another 2 weeks, shaking once or twice each day and at the end of this second two weeks, the extract is ready to use. This keeps indefinitely. Just store it as you do your other extracts.

***Don't try to use the zest, I never do. Since you have to remove it all and replace it with fresh, removing all that zest wouldn't be fun, you could strain it, but in order to get all the zest out of there, you would have to use a cheese cloth. Then you will also be letting some of the extracted essence to be absorb by the cloth. Also there are lots of recipes that I use this in and I wouldn't want any flecks of lemon or orange to be there. The third reason is that as the extract is used, you can add more Vodka and remove the lemon strips and place more fresh strips of lemon peel in there. The whole slices of peel are just the best way to go with this.

In my picture, the orange extract is on the left and the lemon is on the right. The lemon looks like it has too much white left on the peel, but it really does't. If it did, that piece of peel would be floating on the top and I would have removed it.

This makes a great addtition to gifts through out the year. Just tuck a small bottle of it in with that gift. It is always appreciated. You can pour it into a tiny little bottle and add a fresh thin slice of lemon peel. Looks so pretty!

I have seen so many recipes that use water and the Vodka. I don't add water when I make vanilla extract, so I sure don't to add it to my lemon or orange extracts either. I like my recipe better.