I hope I'm not just thinking out loud but I've been thinking of making vinegar. Is anyone around here making their own vinegar. Seems easy but one thing I'm not yet clear on is how to measure the acid level... other than by taste. Any advise will be welcomed.
You'll also need some PH 4.0 and PH 7 calibration liquid that you can order on Amazon or pick up at your local Hydroponic Shop.
Also, the Ideas In Food book has a great section on making your own vinegars, and it's an all around great book to have in general.
Cook With Passion!
- Six stitches to go home early and you can't die until your shift is over.
"Cooking is an ode to repetition - not for lack of imagination, but as a quest for perfection."
-- Chef Santi Santamaria
With that said, I'll have to re-read the chapter on making vinegar in the Ideas in Food book, but I don't recall them ever actually testing the acidity level. If you want to know what the exact PH of the vinegar is that you make, then a digital tester is a nice device to have but I don't think it's really necessary in the vinegar making process.
This is actually something that myself and one of my cooks were just discussing the other day and are planning on tackling in a few months if possible.
I think I'll just worry about the acid level after the fact.
So what is your plan for a mother? Again, I read differing opinions. Some say it will happen naturally; others say the chance of spoilage is high if a mother isn't formally introduced. I'm thinking of spiking my wine (excess champagne from the New Years Eve celebration that we all slept through) with some stuff I saw at Whole Foods -- organic vinegar with mother included. I hope the mother has not been pasteurized to death.
Good Chefs don't follow recipes...Great Chefs do!
Ideas In Food book recommends picking up organic apple cider vinegar with a "live mother." You can find these at health food stores or whole foods. From there, they simply cut off a piece of the mother and use it to start a new batch. To my recollection, they just dump the wine right in. After the fermentation process, they'll remove the vinegar from the mother and do a final aging for flavor. This step can take some time.
@Limey,
You do make a good point, but I think it's more the ability to experiment with flavors and see if you can achieve unique results. It's also a good way to get rid of open bottles of wine; admittedly that's less of a problem at home then it is at the restaurant. ;-)
* I believe that boughten is a Wisconsin term, I swear, I hear it all the time.
Pineapple vinegar.
Variety is one reason, frugality is another, and quality might be another. Some say, but I don't know yet, that craft-made vinegar is far superior to factory made. It is the last item that intrigues me the most.
I've already been through the phase of mods to bough-en vinegar. It works and it works well. I'm curious about "stepping it up a notch" and "taking it to the next level". BTW, I abhor both of those phrases but feel compelled to use them since they appear to be trendy terms.
Chef J... thanks for citing the book. That was my notion. There is one brand of vinegar in whole foods with mother. (Its not too cheap but it is affordable.)
Thanks all for the thoughts!
The store had an end-cap display for a Mexican brand of white vinegar (Clemente-Jacques) that they started carrying recently. Up until about a year ago, the only white vinegars available, here, were condimentado ("condimented") - that is, they had spices added (I forget exactly what's in them, but it's at least black pepper and cumin - a very common combination here). It used to be almost impossible to find regular, white, distilled vinegar - except, once in a while, at an import store.
Eventually Heinz white vinegar and a generic brand began showing up in the regular supermarkets. Now, with this new item, they had added another plain white vinegar.
Since it was a better price than the others and I was going to be needing some soon, I decided to get a bottle. When I looked at it, however, I noticed something different. The white vinegars such as Heinz are distilled from grains and, of course, there are some vinegars made specifically from rice.
This vinegar is made from sugar cane! I don't know how common or uncommon that may be to any of you, but it's the first time I've encountered it.
At home, I tasted regular white vinegar and this new white vinegar side by side and the one made from cane was actually somewhat "fruity."
It will be interesting to see how this works out in various applications.
Are any of you familiar with this?
and take pics!
It has been almost a fortnight and the experiment is going well. The champagne in the carafe passed gas for a couple of days and then settled into its current state of, for lack of a better term, flatness. The carafe is flat de-gassed champagne and still smells like champagne. I'm keeping it covered with a plastic baggy over the top, but opened at the sides so air can freely move in, out, and all about. No growth of the mother is detectable yet. More news later.
More news later.