Skip to main content
Drink

Sugar Vinegar

A fermented sugar solution made by boiling water, adding sugar, cold water, yeast, and aging for nine days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Sugar Vinegar

Why it works: Sugar and spread match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Sugar Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sugar water

  1. Boil the spring water and skim thoroughly.

  2. Add 2 pounds of coarse sugar to every gallon of boiling water.

  3. When cool, mix in 1 quart of cold water for every gallon of hot water.

Ferment

  1. Add a toast spread with yeast to the mixture.

  2. Stir for nine days, then transfer to a barrel.

  3. Place the barrel in a sunny spot and cover the bung-hole with a piece of slate.

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.

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.

  1. Sugar + spreadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 the acids that make the vinegar.
Spring water
Forms the liquid base in which the sugar dissolves and the fermentation takes place.
Yeast
Converts the sugar into alcohol and starts the fermentation that later turns into acetic acid.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast-spread toast at the right temperature. The mixture should be cool when the yeast is added, because hot liquid can kill yeast cells. Cooling the sugar water first keeps the yeast alive so it can start fermenting 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.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes