Best Common Vinegar
Ingredients
Directions
Make the vinegar
Boil the river water and sugar for 10 minutes, skimming as needed.
Pour the mixture into a large clean tub and let it cool to milk-warm.
Add barm or yeast and let it sit for 24 hours in a warm place, away from direct heat.
Bottle
Bottle the vinegar in clean stone bottles and cork them well.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- River water
- Forms the liquid base in which the sugar dissolves and ferments into vinegar.
- Strong moist sugar
- Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast or barm converts into alcohol and then acetic acid.
- Barm or yeast
- Starts the fermentation that turns the sweetened liquid into vinegar.
The step that matters
Cooling to milk-warm before adding barm or yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool to a mild warmth before the culture is added. Warmth that is too low slows fermentation, so the temperature needs to sit in a comfortable middle range.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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