Skip to main content
Drink

Vinegar, Fruit

A homemade vinegar made by fermenting fruit with water, yeast, and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pear and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 649 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Vinegar, Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Crush the fruit well with a stamper and place it in a suitable tub.

  2. For every 2 bushels of fruit, add 4 gallons of boiling water and stir well.

  3. Set the mixture in a warm place for a week, skimming off impurities as fermentation arises.

Strain and ferment

  1. After a week, strain the vinegar through strong fine linen, pressing the pulp.

  2. Put the juice in a barrel, stir in 1 pint of yeast, and add a piece of bread.

  3. Ensure the cask is full, loosely put the bung in, and cover with a piece of flannel.

  4. Set in a warm place for 1 month to 6 weeks until the vinegar is ready for bottling.

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. Pear + appletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pear + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fruit
Provides the sugars and juice that fermentation converts into vinegar.
Yeast
Starts the fermentation that turns the fruit sugars into alcohol.
Bread
Adds nutrients that help the yeast and fermentation along.

The step that matters

Keep the cask full and loosely bunged. A full cask limits contact with air, so unwanted spoilage organisms have less room to grow. A loose bung lets gases escape while the fermentation continues.

“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.

You might also like

Apple WaterApple Water81 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipes