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Drink

Common Vinegar

A vinegar made by boiling sugar and water, fermenting with yeast and toasted bread, then aging in sunlight.

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 ↓

Common Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the sugar and water together, skimming off any scum that rises.

  2. Once warm, spread yeast thickly on both sides of the toasted bread and add it to the mixture.

  3. Let it sit for 24 hours to ferment.

Ferment and mature

  1. Transfer the mixture to a cask placed in direct sunlight.

  2. Cover the bung-hole with a saucer or tile to keep out dust.

  3. Make it in March; it will be ready to use by July or August.

  4. If it's not sour enough, let it sit longer before bottling.

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

Lisbon sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast converts into alcohol, which then becomes acetic acid.
Yeast
Starts the fermentation that turns the sugary liquid into alcohol.
Bread
Carries the yeast into the liquid, helping it spread and start fermenting.

The step that matters

Skimming the boiled sugar and water. Scum rising during boiling can carry impurities and off-flavours into the vinegar. Removing it keeps the final liquid clean-tasting and helps the fermentation proceed without contamination.

“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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