Vinegar -A Success Story

 

I love vinegar  I usually have no fewer than 5 vinegar types in my cabinets. I love it on salad and potatoes and noodle dishes. I love salt and vinegar chips and pickles and mustard and hp sauce and lots of things that are secretly just vinegar vehicles. They are all my favorite so take it with a grain of salt when I tell you that apple cider vinegar is my favorite  

For the purpose of this project and due to my deep appreciation for vinegar generally, I have decided to make apple cider vinegar as one of my dressing options  

As it turns out it takes too long to make and age the cider so I decided to try apple scrap vinegar.

Apple scrap vinegar is a weaker but also easier version of apple cider vinegar. I started this in January as I knew it was going to need a fair amount of aging to be tasty.

Here is the small but successful apple scrap vinegar that I made and that is now aging in my kitchen cabinet. It is surrounded by its heftier cousins in aging and a separate project for the year (the mead project).

Just after the New Year my Father in Law came over to teach us his fantastic apple (and pear) sauce recipe. I asked him and David to save the cores and scraps and peels for me so that I could try this project. 

Then after reading a number of helpful google recommendations I decide to toss those because of potential pesticides in the peels. 

I went and picked up some local organic apples and scrubbed the heck out of them and made a few pies and a bag of new and hopefully pesticide free scrap.

I decided not to use any starter or sugar/honey but just put them into a clean jar (minus seeds). I covered them with cold water from the tap and let it go. 

For the sakes of both the vinegar and the mead we are luck to have well water and nothing chlorinated that might adversely impact our outcomes.

I put a cheese cloth on the top to let in wild yeast and twice a day stirred it with a clean spoon. 

What should be happening here is a battle between the yeasts/fungi and bacteria and dreaded mold. What I wanted was fermentation and no mold. The stirring  gives the mold a hard time because I kept knocking it off the surfaces and if all goes according to plan at the end of a week the yeast and desirable bacteria win the war and I get something that smells a good deal like beer with hints of apple. 

I was nervous about this process but kept on stirring  and crossing my fingers. 

Sure enough about 6 days after it started, the jar smelled very fermented but not at all moldy or spoiled. 

I let it sit for a few weeks to age and to let all the off gassing happen through the cheese cloth. 

It started to smell less like beer and more like old tea and watery cider. 

I filtered out and funneled  the liquid into a clean jar and let it sit some more to age. It smelled very meh and not like something I wanted to eat but I hoped it just needed more time. 

After a week or so more I decided to bottle it. 

It was time to bottle the mead anyway and it made sense to do them at once. 

It smelled like weak cider vinegar and looked right. It had produced a mother so if I decide to try this again I will get a nice head start. 

It’s been in the cabinet for almost a month now and has begun to smell quite nice.

So far so good. 

If you want to try this at home here is the site I based mine on.