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To Make Vinegar Without Fruit

This recipe describes making vinegar from molasses, yeast, and water without fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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To Make Vinegar Without Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Make the vinegar

  1. Combine molasses, yeast, and warm rainwater in a jar or keg.

  2. Cover the opening with gauze to keep out air.

  3. In hot weather, place the jar in the sun, near the stove, or in a chimney corner.

  4. After three weeks, check the vinegar's sharpness.

  5. If needed, add more molasses.

Make white vinegar

  1. For pure white vinegar, mix 1 pint of acetic acid with 7 pints of soft water.

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

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Provides sugars that yeast ferments into alcohol, which later becomes acetic acid.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the molasses into alcohol to start the vinegar process.
Acetic acid
Supplies ready-made acidity for making white vinegar without fermentation.

“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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