To Make Vinegar
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the liquid
Boil water and sugar together, skimming off the scum as it rises.
Pour the mixture into tubs and let it cool to room temperature.
Rub a piece of toast with yeast and add it to the cooled mixture.
Ferment and store
Let it ferment for 24 hours in a sunlit location.
After fermentation, transfer the vinegar into iron-hooped vessels.
Seal the vessels with a tile to keep out dust.
Draw off into small stone bottles at the end of June or beginning of July.
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
- Water
- Forms the liquid base in which the sugar dissolves and the fermentation takes place.
- Coarse lisbon sugar
- Provides the sugar that yeast converts into alcohol, which then becomes acetic acid.
- Yeast
- Starts the fermentation that turns the sweet liquid into alcohol.
- Toast
- Carries the yeast into the liquid and gives it a surface to work from.
The step that matters
Cool the mixture to room temperature before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed or slowed by high heat, so adding it to a hot liquid can stop fermentation before it starts. Cooling first lets the yeast survive and begin converting sugar.
“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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