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A Cheap and Good Vinegar

A vinegar made by fermenting sugar water with a slice of bread soaked in yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,638 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

A Cheap and Good Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sweet liquid

  1. Boil water and sugar together for about 30 minutes, skimming off any foam.

  2. Pour the mixture into a tub and let it cool almost completely.

Ferment

  1. Add the soaked slice of bread to the cooled mixture.

  2. After one week, transfer the mixture into stone bottles or a cask.

  3. Keep the bottles uncorked in a sunny spot or near a fire for six months.

  4. Cover the bunghole with a piece of crape or gauze to keep out insects.

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. Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast converts into alcohol, which acetic bacteria then turn into acetic acid.
Fresh yeast
Starts the fermentation that turns the sweetened water into alcohol.
Water
Serves as the liquid base in which the sugar dissolves and ferments.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool almost completely before adding the bread. Adding the bread to hot liquid would kill the yeast, so fermentation would not start. Cooling to near room temperature keeps the yeast alive.

“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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