Skip to main content
Drink

Ohst Essig — Fruit Vinegar

A homemade vinegar made by fermenting crushed fruit with water, yeast, and bread.

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

Why it works: Apple and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,790 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Ohst Essig — Fruit Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Crush the fruit well with a stamper or cider-press.

  2. Pour 4 gallons of boiling water over the crushed fruit in a suitable tub.

  3. Stir well and let it stand in a warm place for a week, skimming off impurities as fermentation rises.

  4. Strain the mixture through fine linen, pressing the pulp to extract juice.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Put the juice in a barrel, stir in 1 pint of yeast, and add a piece of bread.

  2. Ensure the barrel is full, loosely put in the bung, and cover with a piece of flannel.

  3. Let it stand in a warm place for 1 to 6 weeks until the vinegar is ready to bottle.

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. Apple + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Fruit
Provides the sugars and juice that ferment into vinegar.
Yeast
Starts the fermentation that converts the fruit sugars into alcohol.
Bread
Adds nutrients and a starter that helps the fermentation along.

The step that matters

Keep the barrel full and loosely bunged. A full barrel limits contact with air that could spoil the liquid, while a loose bung lets gas escape without letting in too much contamination. Vinegar bacteria need air to convert alcohol into acetic acid, so the cover must still allow airflow.

“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

Apple WaterApple Water81 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipes