What even is vinegar? I mean, I know it literally means "sour wine." So, when I open a bottle
of wine but I don't drink all of it and then it starts to taste kinda sour after a few
days, is that vinegar?
Well, kinda. At least, it's the start of vinegar. That is exactly what happened a few years
back to a the author of this book, "Vinegar, the Eternal Condiment," by Reginald Smith.
Here he is.
"I had a coworker that had introduced me to home brewing, so I thought I could make a
maple wine from maple syrup and it tasted absolutely horrible. And so I left it on my
counter over Christmas vacation, and when I came back there was a layer on top of it,
a gelatinous layer. And looking it up, I realized it was a mother of vinegar."
Smith's little discovery there was basically the same one made by ancient Babylonians some
5,000 years previously, and then by ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks — basically everybody
figured this out because it's simply inevitable.
You make some kind of sweet drink — maybe a fruit juice, or a wort made from grain.
And then as it kinda sits around, the yeast that are ubiquitous in the environment come
in here, they eat some of the sugars and they basically poop out alcohol. You have a taste,
and you notice that it still tastes pretty delicious and it makes you feel funny, which
you really like — so you keep it around.
But then, as it continues to sit, a different class of microorganism from the environment
settles in here — a class of bacteria known as acetobacters. And they eat some of the
alcohol, and then basically poop out ascetic acid. And if they're really happy, they decide
to settle down and build themselves a little house. This is called the mother.
"Mother of vinegar is basically a big party of bacteria on top of your wine or alcohol.
The ascetic acid bacteria come together and they begin producing cellulose, which is the
same compound that makes leaves, grass, to provide like an environment for themselves
that helps them to get air from the environment, which they need to make vinegar, as well as
contact the alcohol in the brew, which they need to make vinegar as well."
And if you're an ancient Babylonian, you maybe push this creepy layer aside to get yourself
a swig of your drink that makes you feel funny. You think, hmm, this tastes really sour now,
and it's not making me feel funny anymore. This sucks.
But, I've got some bland hunk of beast over here, or maybe one that tastes kinda off.
I wonder if I could make it taste better by pouring on some of my sour juice.
And indeed, it does taste good, and a few more happy accidents later, you realize that
if you leave your food in your sour juice and seal it away from air, your food doesn't
spoil. You've pickled it in a liquid that's too acidic for other microbial life to survive.
And as a result, you survive through the lean times when there isn't much food growing.
You are fruitful and multiply, and you are able to pass your love of sour juice onto
your children and thus vinegar conquers the world, just as it conquered Reginald Smith's
world.
Remember that maple wine vinegar that he made accidentally?
"I figured, Hey, I'll just let it go. Better than dumping it. And two months later I had
a very good-tasting maple vinegar. So I figured, Hey, here's something I am good it."
Quite good, actually. So much so that he started his own company here, Supreme Vinegar, just
outside Philadelphia. He makes all kinds of boutique vinegars and also supplies mother
of vinegar to other vinegar makers.
Instead of just waiting around for acetobacters in the environment to colonize your alcohol,
it's much faster to just to drop in a hunk of mother. Why do they call it mother?
"I am your mother."
"Mother of vinegar was not known to be made from bacteria until the late 19th century,
from Louis Pasteur. Before that, they didn't know what it was. They guessed it was alive,
but they called it a mother because they knew that if they transferred that mother from
one vat of wine to another, you could start another vinegar fermentation."
Another thing that ancient people figured out through experimentation is that, at some
point in the vinegar-making process, you have to stop. That is, you have to seal off the
vinegar from the oxygen that acetobacters need.
"If it's left open to air, the bacteria will use up any alcohol that's left in the vinegar.
And once that's gone, they don't just die. They start eating the vinegar itself, breaking
it down until you only have water left. And so over time, that'll weaken the vinegar until
it's not usable, or maybe even spoils."
You can see Smith here doing various chemical tests to see if his vinegar is ready to seal
off. He's measuring the pH, trying to get the ascetic acid content to 5, 6 maybe 7%
by volume.
"Above 7% it'll burn your mouth, pretty badly."
So when the numbers are looking good, the vinegar-maker seals their product off from
air in a barrel or a bottle or something. And that's when the flavor really starts to
develop — as it ages, for months or even years, as in the case of perhaps the most
celebrated vinegar in the world — balsamic, from Italy.
Basically a sour syrup. They called it "balsamico" because it reminded them of a balsam — that
is, a resin taken from various plants and used to make perfumes, cosmetics or medicines
— balms.
They weren't saying this vinegar is a balm — but rather, it's like a balm. Just like
nobody is saying this coffee literally contains chocolate and hazelnut, but rather it's reminiscent
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Anyways, balsamic vinegar. The first solid historical mention of this stuff goes back
to 16th century Italy.
"Primarily the region of Modena. Where it's still — that's the primary place it's made.
And balsamic vinegar, instead of using wine for vinegar, they use grape must, which is
pretty much boiled-down grape juice, which is then fermented to vinegar. And not only
that, the most traditional balsamic vinegar, which is also very expensive, is aged over
at least 12 years in successively smaller wooden barrels made out of different woods."
Yeah, look at these barrels. No seal is 100%, so the vinegar slowly evaporates and reduces
as it ages. Once a year, they would move it to a smaller barrel of different wood from
which to extract different flavors. This is oak, juniper, ash, cherry, etc.
Now I know what you're thinking. You thinking, how is this so cheap if it's made by this
potentially decades-long process? Well, the stuff made by that process absolutely is not
cheap. This is not that.
"There's a cheaper balsamic vinegar, called Balsamic Vinegar of Modena, which is pretty
much grape must mixed with red wine vinegar and aged for about 60 days. And that's primarily
what you get at the supermarket."
OK, so now I think I know another thing you're thinking. You're thinking, What a minute,
is vinegar an alcoholic beverage? I mean, it's made from wine, or beer, or in the case
of distilled vinegar, it's made from a distilled spirit. Hooch.
The hooch can't be super-high alcohol. Too high and no bacteria can survive in there.
It's gotta be watered down to maybe 10% booze, and then the acetobacters can get to work.
But regardless, vinegar is always made from alcohol.
Now, there are Industrial vinegars — acetic acid made for industrial purposes. They can
do that chemically through some significantly less-wholesome processes. But in most countries
you can't sell them as vinegar for human consumption. Food-grade vinegar is always made from alcohol.
And this fact has, for centuries, presented an interesting conundrum in the Islamic world,
where intoxicants are strictly forbidden.
It's a matter of scripture that the Prophet Muhammad himself loved vinegar. But to this
day you can find discussions online where muslims are debating whether and which kinds
of vinegar really are halal.
Oh, there's there's our friend Reggie chiming in. As he explains in his book, the way vinegar
is historically manufactured in the Islamic world is through a process of double fermentation.
The juice goes in the barrel, and it doesn't come out until it's vinegar. There's no intermediate
step in which you have a stable wine.
The fermentation of the sugars into alcohol can overlap somewhat with the fermentation
of the alcohol into acid, but at some point in the process there's gonna be a lot of alcohol
in the barrel, and there is going to be some amount of alcohol left in the finished vinegar.
"You want to make sure the alcohol is not completely gone, but down to like between
.2-.4% alcohol by volume. That's enough to alcohol to give some flavor to the vinegar,
but it's not so little that the bacteria start cannibalizing the vinegar and reducing the
acidity."
But now listen to me, middle schoolers who are getting ideas: Don't go raiding your parent's
pantry trying to get buzzed off of vinegar. When something has less than half a percent
of alcohol in it, like this does, your body simply wouldn't be able to absorb the alcohol
fast enough as you digested this stuff in order to make you intoxicated. Plus, I think
if you chugged a whole bunch of this, you'd be seeing it again really soon.
But while vinegar generally requires alcohol as a precursor, the process of transforming
said booze can take many forms. Case in point, Reginald Smith's personal favorite anecdote
from the history of vinegar. The French navy, during the Seven Years War, used vinegar to
swab the decks of its ships, which meant that some procurement officer had to go out and
buy vinegar for the navy.
"And the people who won the contracts, like many people who have war contracts, were not
completely scrupulous. And so what they tried to do is they tried to pass off wine, and
they would have their workers urinate in it to make it acidic, to pass it off as vinegar,
to sell it to the navy. And the craziest part about this story is that it actually worked,
because somehow that speeded fermentation."
Maybe don't try that one at home, but here's something you can try, right back where we
started: the wine that has been left open for a few days. Is it vinegar? Not quite.
There are few other chemical reactions that can make this taste sour before it really
starts becoming vinegar, and that process will be delayed by a class of preservatives
used in wine called sulfites. Since ancient times, winemakers have added sulfites to keep
their wine from turning into vinegar.
Exposed to air, in an open bottle, those sulfites will slowly break down. But you can speed
that process with this a standard 3% drug store solution of hydrogen peroxide — about
a half teaspoon per bottle of wine. Pour it in, shake it up, and after a few minutes,
the peroxide and the sulfites have basically destroyed each other.
Then you gotta cut your wine with an equal part of water. Most wine on the shelf has
a high enough alcohol concentration to to kill bacteria. You either have to wait for
some of the alcohol to evaporate off, or you can dilute it. Then you just wait for wild
acetobacters to come along.
"It can take a little bit longer and sometimes can be less reliable, but wild fermentation
is how vinegar was made for much of history."
But the sure bet would be to seed your wine with some mother. In my case, I've bought
some apple cider vinegar with live mother in it. That's ths stuff on the bottom, there.
Shake up the bottle to get the mother redistributed. Smith recommends about 8 ounces of this for
a bottle of wine. Cover that with some breathable stuff, and a couple weeks later your mother
on top, and under that is your vinegar. Keep it sealed in an airtight container, in a nice
dark pantry, and it can last for as long as humans have and will use vinegar to make their
food safer and tastier. Vinegar: the eternal condiment.
Also coffee: the eternal beverage. Thanks again to Trade for their sponsorship. Get
30% of your first bag with my link in the description. Now, has anybody ever tried ... nah.
"Kill me. I should not be."