Homemade Vişinată – Original Romanian Recipe

Ingredients

  • 5 kg fresh sour cherries, stems removed and washed, preferably from tree in your backyard
  • 1.5 kg sugar
  • 1 litre 100% alcohol (or closest available)i
  • Sealable clear bottle (7 litres)ii
  • Lots of patience!

Recipe

  • Put a quarter of cherries in the bottle. Add a quarter of sugar (be sure not to put the sugar in the bottle first). Seal the bottle and place it in a sunny location for a week or until all sugar is dissolved.
  • Taste and add sugar if necessary to make it sweeter. Leave in sunny location for another week.
  • Taste again. Now add alcohol to taste. Vişinată should be ~30% alcohol.
  • Seal the bottle well and place it in a cool, dark place for 6 months.
  • After 6 months, decant the liquid and filter it through a cheesecloth.iii Pour in regular bottle.
  • Enjoy on special occasions, brag to a friend, serve the cherries in a bowl for nibbling!
  • Bring a bottle to Gran’Pa for his 90th birthday!!

Photos

Homemade Visinata - 1

Homemade Visinata - 2

Homemade Visinata - 3

Homemade Visinata - 4

Homemade Visinata - 5

Homemade Visinata - 6

Homemade Visinata - 7

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Sixth Months Later…
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According to my handy dandy hydrometre, the resulting liqueur is… well, it didn’t exactly work. Too much sugar in the solution. So I have no fucking clue because a proper ebulliometre is $3k and that seems excessive even for me. So the super-saccharine concoction that readily disguises itself as an iron fist in a crème de cassisesque glove is of unknown potency.v So unless you’re the operator of a full-fledged winery and have access to such equipment, use your experience to guide you and mult noroc!
___ ___ ___

  1. In Alberta we have access to Everclear, which is 190 proof. This is what was used in this recipe.
  2. A five-litre and two-litre bottle were used here. No seven-litre bottles were readily available at the go-to store in Little Italy.
  3. Quadruple over the cheesecloth and be spend a few extra minutes squeezing out the last few drops of juice from the soggy cherries. You’ve waited 6 months for this bottle, don’t skimp on cherry squeezing now!
  4. You’ll note that the sunny trio has arrived! More fun furniture is now on order but it’ll be four more months of a six-month lead time to manufacture in Italy. A very sexy and rather hip* couch will be the cherry on top of my recently renovated basement. Between the custom millwork, custom lighting, and custom furniture, it turns out that the more you delve into furniture and design,** the more you realise that buying Ikea is like eating at McDonald’s. Not even Montana’s or whatever sysco steakhouse Joe Average thinks “decent.” Ikea == McShitburger.

    So if you don’t eat plasticised cum recycled fast food, why are you still consuming pressed shitboard in other domains ? Don’t be that doctor who recommends his patients exercise to “get tougher” and then prescribes antibiotics for a mild illness in the next breath.
    ___ ___
    *As in hippie, not hipster, nor in any way ironically so. Gotta keep one foot in the past and one in the future if you want to own the moment.
    **Of the masters of the shell,
    Who heard the starry music
    And recount the numbers well;
    Olympian bards who sung
    Divine Ideas below,
    Which always find us young
    And always keep us so.
    ~Emerson, Ode to Beauty

  5. By resultant volume, the Vişinată should be about 30% but I tell you it punches above its weight.

9 thoughts on “Homemade Vişinată – Original Romanian Recipe

  1. shinohai says:

    Well if that just doesn’t look tasty, gonna give this a go when I get back home. Golden Grain is the more popular spirit in my neck of the woods, but sure I can find some Everclear in a pinch.

  2. […] couple bigger-ticket items are heading this way in the next 6-9 months, some of which have been teased already, but all of which (coincidentally) have their roots in the 1970’s even though they’re […]

  3. […] few postpartum days. We’re definitely in celebration mode – so it’s champagne, visinata, and La Favourite cheesecake for everyone who stops by! […]

  4. […] little shindig, if for no other reason than to see some friends and pick-up the hotly anticipated Italian-made furniture that I’d ordered way back in January (more on which soon). But back to the ROH-DAY-OH […]

  5. […] this was the Italian-made piece(s) of furniture alluded to this past spring, pictures really don’t do the Mah Jong justice. It really does make a perfect centrepiece for […]

  6. […] is of the boys and their now-90-year-old great-grandfather. Pretty good genes, eh ? He looooved the Visinata we brought him for his birthday. It was at least on par with the superlative Schwedentorte my […]

  7. […] if you’ll raise a glass of vişinată or țuică and sing along with me in my mother’s mother tongue […]

  8. […] a single car garage (as seen decorated here) and a generous backyard for playing and gardening (as seen growing sour cherries here), instead of a late-20th century or early-21st century abode with a a double- or triple-garage. As […]

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