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 ↓
To Make Vinegar
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the liquid
Boil sugar, water, and brown bread together for 1 hour.
Remove the bread and pour the liquid into an open vessel to cool.
Ferment
Add yeast the following day.
Let it stand for 12 to 14 days.
Age and bottle
Transfer to a cask and place it in the sun until sufficiently sour, about 6 months.
Cover the bunghole with a piece of tile to keep out dust.
Draw the vinegar into small stone bottles for use.
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.
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Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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 ferments into alcohol, which later turns into acetic acid.
- Yeast
- Starts fermentation by converting the sugar into alcohol, the first step toward vinegar.
The step that matters
Add the yeast only after the liquid has cooled. Yeast is killed by high heat, so adding it to the hot boiled liquid would stop fermentation before it starts. Waiting until the liquid is cool keeps the yeast alive to work on the 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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