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Strawberry Vinegar

A fermented vinegar made by steeping strawberries in wine vinegar, then sweetening with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: White wine and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,776 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Strawberry Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the vinegar

  1. Place ripe strawberries in a jar and add 1½ pints of white wine vinegar for each pound of berries.

  2. Cover the jar with thick paper and let it sit for 3-4 days.

  3. Drain the vinegar and pour it over 4 pounds of fresh strawberries.

  4. Let the mixture sit for 3 days.

  5. Drain and repeat with fresh strawberries.

Make the syrup

  1. After the final draining, add 1 pound of refined sugar to each pint of vinegar.

  2. Stir the mixture over low heat until the sugar dissolves, about 5 minutes.

  3. Skim off any foam, pour the syrup into a pitcher, and cover it until the next day.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the vinegar and cork it loosely for the first few days.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. White wine + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,586 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ripe strawberries
Provide the fruit flavour and aroma that the vinegar takes up during infusion.
White wine vinegar
Acts as the liquid that extracts and carries strawberry flavour, and adds sharp acidity.
Fresh strawberries
Added in later rounds to deepen the fruit flavour of the vinegar.
Refined sugar
Sweetens the vinegar and balances its acidity once dissolved into a syrup.

The step that matters

Stir over low heat until the sugar dissolves. Gentle heat dissolves sugar fully without boiling off the delicate strawberry aroma or scorching the syrup. Undissolved sugar can leave grainy crystals in the finished vinegar.

“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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