So I was just going to do a condiment post, but this one ended up a bit monstrous. So I'm doing it on it's own and I'll post others later. My focus is going to be on products that are overpriced and not particularly high quality in the grocery store.
White Wine Vinegar: This isn't exactly a sandwich condiment, but some people use a ton of vinegar in their cooking. I am one of those individuals. Store bought white wine vinegar is in fact mostly distilled. It's for lack of a better description over priced crap. You can make your own with some mason jars, a little cheesecloth, a bunch of cheap white wine, and a little starter (a small bottle of unfiltered, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar in our case).
So first a word about cheesecloth. This product is crazy expensive in the grocery store. I suggest buying it in bulk. It might seem like a big investment, but if you're going to start doing things on your own in the kitchen more regularly you'll find it very worth it. I use cheesecloth ALL THE TIME. If I had to buy it in the store I'd have filed for bankruptcy by now.
Next on choosing white wine. The huge jugs, or the boxed wine will do. When I first looked up how to do this all the guides said "pick a wine you would drink, because the better the wine the better the vinegar". This is true, but not true enough. The vinegar I've made from cheap boxed wine is excellent. As in some of the best vinegar I've ever had, because we're all used to the mostly distilled waste passed off as wine vinegar in the grocery. As this blog is about being self sufficient and doing for yourself I am NOT going to recommend that you go out and get snooty wine to intentionally spoil. That's just silly.
Now to make the vinegar. Start by running your mason jars and rings through the dishwasher with a hot dry. Then take them out while they are still hot and fill them 80% of the way with your wine. Between the alcohol in the wine, and the acid in the vinegar it will become this is all the sterilization I've ever needed. Now put enough apple cider vinegar in each jar to leave about an inch of air space. Now take a few layers of cheesecloth and lay it over the top of the jar and put your rings on. There, the work is done. Put the jars in the back of a cabinet somewhere and forget about them for . . . oh say 3 months. (Hey it's easy, I didn't say it was fast) Take the vinegar out and test it by tasting a little. If it doesn't taste and smell enough like vinegar put it back and check once a month for flavor. When it's how you want it replace the cheesecloth with mason jar lids. Technically at this point it's a living breathing thing. So if you blast through vinegar at a rapid rate then you are in fact done. It will be good for probably 6 months this way, give or take depending on conditions. (I won't lie that's me being conservative and not wanting to give bad advice. I've kept this type of vinegar longer than 6 months, but I don't know for sure how long it will last. So be careful if you try to go longer) If you use it in raw applications like salad dressings then the live culture is quite good for you. It will be cloudy, and will never settle if you leave it alive. If you want to keep the vinegar for more than a year then you want to give the sealed mason jars a 10 minute boiling water bath, make sure the water doesn't reach the rings. If you really want it to keep there is a process for adding sulfides to the vinegar to extend it's shelf life, but I've never done that and used my vinegar for up to a year or so past when it finished brewing. So I don't recommend it, the sulfides aren't really good for you anyway.
If you boil the vinegar then the particulate will start to settle and you'll eventually be able to "decant" the clear vinegar off the sediment. There is nothing bad about the sediment, but the clear vinegar does have a cleaner taste, and is more attractive if you care about such things.
So some background on why you take some of the steps you take. The vinegar requires oxygen to brew. So the cheesecloth let's oxygen in, while keeping dust and other nasties out of the liquid. I tried a few other approaches and I found that the brewing just took way too long. Using the cheesecloth approach I was able to brew the vinegar much faster than trying to keep it in bottles.
Second a word on pickling. If you follow specific pickling recipes I do not recommend using this vinegar. Pickle recipes are carefully calibrated around a specific acidity, and that acidity is necessary to make the preservation safe. That said if you are willing to go out and buy some ph test strips you can play the chemistry game of getting your vinegar to the exact same acidity as distilled from the store and going from there. Because I don't use specific pickling recipes when I pickle I just make sure that my vinegar is more acidic than distilled (which I keep around for cleaning purposes) and go from there. I test this by weighing out a set amount of baking soda on my scale and then using a dropper I put drops of distilled vinegar on the pile of baking soda till I get a drop that does not react. I then do the same thing with my home made vinegar, and if the reaction doesn't stop happening faster with my home made vinegar then I let my acid keep brewing. It's not precise, but as long as my vinegar is more acidic than distilled then I know I'm in safe territory. Also, because it's brewed and not distilled even at higher acidity it has a more delicate flavor. So I don't have to worry about overpowering myself. If you want to use your vinegar for pickling you MUST take the pasteurizing step of running your vinegar through a water bath. The live culture will do all sorts of strange things to the pickling process.
I know this was a long post, but a lot of people love my vinegar, and I wanted to share. I know this might seem like a lot of work, but you never take more than a couple steps on any given day. It's mostly just about patience. I guarantee you'll never buy vinegar from the store again.
No comments:
Post a Comment