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 ↓
Sugar Vinegar
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the liquid
Boil the water with the sugar until scum rises, then remove the scum.
Pour the mixture into a cask and let it cool to milk-warm (60-65°F).
Ferment
Cut off the crust from the bread, toast it, and cover it with fresh yeast.
Add the bread to the cask and leave it open for 4-5 days.
Cover the bung-hole with paper and pierce it with a pin.
Keep the cask in a warm, dry place without moving it.
If made in March or April, draw off and bottle the vinegar in September.
Bottle
Boil the bottled vinegar for 15 seconds to prevent mother formation.
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.
Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it
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 brown sugar
- Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast turns into alcohol, which later becomes acetic acid.
- Fresh yeast
- Starts the fermentation that converts the sugar into alcohol.
- Bread
- Toasted and coated with yeast, it carries the yeast into the liquid to start fermentation.
The step that matters
Cool the liquid to milk-warm before adding the bread. Yeast is killed by heat, so a hot mixture can stop fermentation, while a cold one slows it. Milk-warm gives the yeast a comfortable range to work in.
“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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