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Second Way to Make Vinegar

A method for producing vinegar using water, sugar, bread, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Second Way to Make Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Combine soft water and coarse sugar in a brewing copper.

  2. Boil and skim off the scum.

  3. Ladle the mixture into a tub.

  4. Let it cool to milk warm.

Start the fermentation

  1. Toast the bread.

  2. Rub both sides with yeast.

  3. Add the bread to the mixture.

  4. Cover with a cloth.

  5. Let it sit for 1 day and night.

  6. Remove the yeast.

Age the vinegar

  1. Place the cask in a warm, sunny location, covered with a tile or lead sheet.

  2. Do not draw off the vinegar before July or August.

  3. You can taste it a month early.

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
Feeds the fermentation, which turns it first into alcohol and then into acetic acid, the sourness of vinegar.
Yeast
Starts the fermentation that converts the sugar mixture into alcohol.
Soft water
Dissolves the sugar and forms the liquid base in which fermentation takes place.
Bread
Carries the yeast so it can spread through the mixture as it ferments.

The step that matters

Let it cool to milk warm. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mixture must be cooled before the yeast-coated bread goes in. If it is too hot, fermentation may fail to start.

“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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