Easy Homemade Amaretto | DISARONNO

Welcome to Savage Kitchen. Today, we are going to be making homemade amaretto. Now, if you've been with me for a little while, you know that I have homemade Irish cream and we did homemade coffee liqueur, Kahlua. Today is all about doing a coffee cat recipe for Di Serrano. Now, there are a lot of different amarettos available on the market. This one's probably the most commonly known, at least here in the US. It's very easy to do a homemade version. You probably have a lot of these ingredients already. One of the questions I get asked most frequently is why? Why would you bother to make homemade liqueurs? One, because I can and I like it. But two, for a lot of people, it's about controlling the type and amount of sugar that you are ingesting, playing with flavors, experimenting, a lot of people like to do homemade gifts. And three, sometimes these aren't available in all parts of the world, or the cost difference in other parts of the world is really extreme, depending on important export tariffs. So, second question I get asked very, very often is, can I get these measurements in milliliters? Yes, I will put conversions in the description below, but in general, when I do recipes, I'm talking about cups and ounces. Not always though, sometimes, especially when we're doing just cocktails, I talk in milliliters, just depends. There's this amazing thing called Google, but I will put them in the description below just to make life a little bit easier. And finally, if you wanna jump ahead at any point and get to a certain part of the technique or the recipe, there are chapter markers below. So let's get into it. Let's start with what amaretto actually is. Amaretto is an almond-flavored liqueur. Its origins are in Italy, and according to De Sirono, dates back to 1525. There is some debate about the actual origin. There's two different families that claim responsibility, but the word amaretto translates literally to a little bitter. So the word amaro means bitter, and if you're interested in amaro, I have a whole video on tasting Italian amaro. It is a wonderful world. I personally love amaro. I love that bitter taste, and I love what it does to cocktails and your dining experience. Amaretto, while it may sound similar, is very, very different than amaro, so especially something like De Sirono. This is very, very sweet. The tasting notes that you find online often describe a little bit of bitterness. I personally, I think this has very, very little bitterness and maybe has a touch of heat, but again, we'll get into that in a little bit. Now, current production of amaretto usually excludes almonds even though the flavor is very, very almond. De Sirono in particular, I'm pretty sure does theirs with apricot pits. There are some brands, usually the higher-end brands, that do make them genuinely from almonds, and we're gonna be using almond extract today, but even though De Sirono doesn't use almonds in their recipe anymore, it tastes just like almonds, and it's delicious, by the way. I have nothing against De Sirono. I think this is fabulous. I just like the homemade version a little bit better. Okay, let's get into what you are going to need for this homemade amaretto. You are going to need almond extract, high-quality, real almond extract, vanilla extract, pure vanilla extract. I don't personally enjoy all of the imitation extracts, so whatever your budget will allow, get the highest-quality extracts that you can afford. Also, they last forever, so don't worry about spoilage, or if you have some leftover from a previous recipe, it is okay to use your extracts. Vodka is going to be our base spirit. Now, you can absolutely make this with other base spirits. Brandy would be wonderful. I personally think rye whiskey would be really, really good in this. I have not tried it yet. I probably will sometime soon, but for just a very easy drinking, simple, you probably have it at home, vodka will do. And then our next ingredient is a syrup. So I'm going to show you how to put together the simple syrup for this recipe, and I'm going to take the opportunity for a shameless plug right now. If you do not want to make your own syrup for this, you can buy Savage Kitchen Cinnamon Demerara. This is very similar to the recipe we're going to be making. There are some differences, but this is actually better and higher quality. Also makes a lovely gift. So for the syrup that we're going to be making for this liqueur, we're going to be using a cup of white granulated sugar, a half a cup of light brown sugar, and a cup of water. So this is somewhere between a simple syrup and a rich, simple syrup. And for me personally, I think that this brings our final result closest to the mouthfeel on Di Serrano. Now, we are going to be flavoring our syrup with a little bit of cinnamon. Now, amaretto is not a cinnamon liqueur. A lot of amarettos though do include other undisclosed spices. To me, those spices taste like cinnamon. Not all cinnamon is created equal. There is Ceylon cinnamon, which I might be butchering that pronunciation. I'm really sorry. And then there's Cassia cinnamon. The difference between them is stark visually. So Ceylon cinnamon, the quill is actually very, it looks like parchment paper. It's much thinner and it's a little ragged on the edges. To smell it, it's a much lighter scent. It's sweeter than the Cassia cinnamon. So Cassia cinnamon, also known as Saigon cinnamon, this is what, at least in North America, you find most commonly. Like the McCormick cinnamon sticks that you buy are Cassia cinnamon. This has the heat that cinnamon sometimes carries with it, like red hots. You're thinking of Cassia cinnamon. We want the cinnamon in this recipe because we do want that little touch of heat to sort of warm up our final results. Tools you're gonna need. You want a heavy-bottomed saucepan to make your syrup. And we're gonna make boiling syrup. It gets hot and we don't want anybody getting hurt. As always, a container for your final result to go in. If you have empties, like if you have a home bar, keep your empties and use that to store your homemade liqueurs. And then a couple of measuring spoons for our extracts. All right, so step one is going to be to make our simple syrup. This little campfire stove is like a jet engine. We're gonna settle down with that. Now, when making simple syrups, and I make a lot as evidenced by Savage Kitchen provisions, there are some tricks to make the process a little bit easier. Now, I like to always heat my water up first. I don't bring it all the way to a boil. I just like the water to get nice and hot because then when I add my sugar, it's gonna dissolve quicker and get me to that final result a little bit faster. And then I'm adding a cup of sugar and half a cup of light brown sugar. I've played with the ratios on this. You could do equal parts white sugar to brown sugar. I think that that's like a little bit too molasses heavy for the flavor here personally. And by the way, Di Serrano flavors their product and colors their product with caramel. We could do that, but again, making caramel syrup is actually very tricky. It's very, very easy to burn the syrup and that burnt flavor. It's a fine line between caramel and burnts and it scorches easily. I'm not a big fan. So I think this is the way to go. So we're gonna give this a stir. Easy as could be, we are going to drop in two to three cinnamon sticks of the cassia cinnamon. If you want a lighter cinnamon flavor, you can use the Ceylon cinnamon, but I'm specifically going for that little bit of heat. And I think the Ceylon is just like a little bit too subtle. So I'm gonna use the cassia cinnamon and we're gonna drop those right in the syrup and let this come to a boil. All right, so now that this is at a boil, whoa, wrong direction. We're gonna turn this off, put the lid on it and let the syrup cool completely. Now letting that syrup cool all the way down does two things. One, it makes us able to use it right away when we're ready to make our actual liqueur, but two, it's gonna let the cinnamon steep into that syrup and infuse that flavor just a little bit. Through the magic of television, I have a batch of syrup that I made earlier today, which is cool and ready to go and has been sitting with the cinnamon sticks in it for probably like two hours now. An hour is enough time to let it cool. If you wanna speed up the process, throw it in the fridge or the freezer for a little bit. Just know that the longer that the cinnamon sticks sit in the syrup, the more intense that flavor is going to be. So, we're going to take our vessel and I need to fish out these cinnamon sticks. Hello. I'm gonna save these for a toddy later. Funnel, forgot to mention funnel. Funnel, if you're doing homemade liqueurs, it's just gonna make your life way easier and slightly less messy. It's sure. So our syrup that we just made yields just shy of two cups of simple syrup. It's so satisfying. Next up, vodka. I'm using vodka because vodka is a neutral spirit. It doesn't really have any flavor to it. It just has the bite of alcohol, ethanol. So you don't need to spend a lot of money on vodka. Use either what you have in the house, get something cheap at the store. Doesn't really matter. You also could make this with brandy or rye whiskey or bourbon. Almond flavor bourbon sounds amazing to me. But whatever you do, we're gonna use two cups of your base spirit. Or maybe mix and match. Maybe do like a cup of rye and a cup of vodka. Damn, I kinda wanna do that right now. Yeah, we're in it. This looks delightful. Now to our flavorings, almonds, vanilla. A little bit actually goes a pretty long way here. For our vanilla, we are just gonna be using one teaspoon of vanilla. Any more than that, I think is a little bit overpowering. It makes us very vanilla forward. Extracts are very, very potent. Next up, our almond extract. For this, we're doing a tablespoon. If you want it to be even more bold, don't be shy about adding more. I would just start less and then increase. It's hard to dial something back once you've gone too far. We got a tablespoon. All right, we're gonna seal this. I love these swing top bottles that have the plastic seal on top. These are great. They give it a really good shake. Wanna make sure that syrup is fully incorporated with our spirit and our extracts. Pretty happy about this. Now I'm gonna share a little dirty, dark secret with you. If you want this to taste even more like Di Serrano, there is a secret ingredient that you can add. I won't tell anybody. It is not necessary, but I do think that it adds the heat that you find in Di Serrano. Before everybody asks me in the comments about how Di Serrano's not spicy, taste it again on its own. You definitely do get that tingling sensation on the side of your tongue, and that's that heat from the Ceylon cinnamon. It also could be black peppercorns or red chili. I'm not sure entirely how they accomplish it in this particular formula, but our drink is gonna be Fireball. I can't stand Fireball, personally. I really, I don't like it. It's very rare that I will buy a small version of any alcohol. I usually buy the full bottles. This, I'm just not a fan. I never use it in anything, but for our purposes here, if you want this to have more bite, adding two ounces of this just instantly brings you there. So. And for me personally, instead of adding two ounces to this batch right here, I have a batch that I already made that has Fireball in it, and we'll taste test between the three of those, okay? This feels like pouring moonshine when it comes out of a mason jar. All right, let's taste some homemade Amaretto. Now, let's start with Di Serrano, so we have a baseline or a comparison of this homemade liqueur. Mm, I love Di Serrano. I think it's delicious. Reminds me of the 90s. It's warming, it's sweet. It does have the bite of alcohol. It tastes like almonds. Mm, I kinda wanna have biscotti to dip in it. Oh, delicious. Next up, we're gonna taste the homemade Amaretto that we made using a cinnamon simple syrup, our almond extract, and vodka. It smells, actually, it smells identical. Hm, this might have a little more bite of ethanol to smell, but otherwise, it smells identical. Like, it smells delicious. Oh, I personally prefer this to the Di Serrano. Don't get me wrong. Clearly, I love Di Serrano. No problem with it. If you wanna go buy Di Serrano, go buy Di Serrano. But this is smoother. It's more delicious. It is absent that little bit of spicy bite that the Di Serrano has, which, for me, in this application, I don't think that's a bad thing. This is luxurious and decadent and screams dessert. I want this over ice cream. I want this in coffee. I want this in tiramisu. I basically wanna just bathe in it. I have ideas. And then, finally, let's taste our homemade Amaretto that uses the secret ingredient, two ounces of Fireball. And that two ounces is if you're using the measurements for this result. If you're doing half batch, which is what I have here, I just added one ounce of Fireball. I mean, to me, that's identical. I don't think it smells quite as good as the Di Serrano. It does have a little bit more of that ethanol smell, and it smells a little bit like Fireball to me. And I don't love the way Fireball smells. To me, it smells like Red Hot. And I love cinnamon, and clearly I love whiskey. And I don't know, just be better, be better, Fireball. Maybe we need to do homemade Fireball. Let me know in the comments if that's something that you would like to see. It's still absolutely delicious. I'm gonna drink the hell out of this. I'm probably gonna cook with all of these things too. Amaretto marshmallows, anybody? But my personal favorite is no surprise because I am 100% biased. It is the homemade version. This is easy. This is delicious. You probably have a lot of these things in your pantry already, and I hope you give it a try. So any questions, comments, leave them below. I love hearing from you guys. I love when people report back what their results were, what they liked, what they didn't like, what they tried. And any ideas you have or things that you would like to see me do next, let me know. Cheers, friends.