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wrote:

> Any suggestions as to how to do this? I'd presume that, once you
> submerge fruit in alcohol, you kill off the bacteria, but I'm not sure.
> How long does one want to submerge the fruit? Is there one best time
> or does it depend on the type of fruit? Do most people add sugar? Is
> there some sort of standard ratio or is it all to taste? Do some
> fruits just not work? Is there an online or text reference for all
> this? What about the jar that you put it in? Can it be anything or
> should it be glass like vodka normally comes in? Thanks. I'm wanting
> to get this ready for a wedding.

Paul's already pointed you at my web site (thanks muchly), but I wonder
if a liqueur is really what you're thinking of. A liqueur is what you
get when you marinate fruit in vodka and then throw away the fruit (or
use it in desserts, whatever). So it's the vodka that's the important
bit. It seems to me that for you, the fruit is the important bit.

For liqueurs, your timing and sugar content are geared toward extracting
the greatest amount of flavor from your fruits, and then adding enough
sugar to make it potable. You also tend to add other ingredients to
balance out flavors. Strictly for generating alcohol-soaked fruit, I
think the answers change. And I don't necessarily have experience there.

But let me take a guess at the answers for alcohol-soaked fruit. For
any fruit, your soaking time is going to be however long it takes to
saturate the fruit. Cut your fruit up into the size sections you want
to eat, erring on the small side, so you have as much surface area for
the vodka to soak in as possible. The time will depend pretty much
entirely on the absorptive qualities of your fruit, and experimenttion
is called for. However, precision is not.

Your real concern, by the way, is oxygen. You're right that the vodka
makes an excellent disinfectant for small and large organisms. But
oxygen, which will brown your fruit, will make both your fruit and your
liqueur taste different, and likely bad. So even in your sealed jar,
try to leave as little head-space above the fruit as possible, and
consider artificial ways of keeping the fruit below the surface (a
weighted net, for instance).

Anyway, back to your questions. I expect people don't use sugar for
fruit; the natural sugars should be more than enough. They do use
plenty for liqueurs, since the fruit's sugars aren't going to be
extracted the way the flavors are. It's all to taste. Your alcohol
quantity should be, "Fill the jar with fruit. Fill the rest of the jar
with alcohol."

For vodka-soaked fruits, any fruit you like will be fine being soaked in
vodka. For a liqueur, well, some fruits are harder to work with, but
anythin you like eating can likely be made to work one way or another.

And I strongly recommend latched glass jars with rubber gasket seals.
Plastic may be problematic if you expect to be soaking the fruit a long
time - plastic may breathe, and will certainly absorb the flavors. So
you'd be stuck with plastic that you wouldn't want to use for anything else.

If you really did mean liqueurs, budget 6 weeks beginning to end for
most fruit liqueurs. Citrus will take longer. Extract-based liqueurs
can be made overnight, but then you're stuck with the flavors you cn get
extracts for. And everybody seems to like coffee liqueurs...

Good luck,
Gunther Anderson