Making fruit vinegar at home

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I have been making my own fruit vinegars for a few years now, and they really are a great way to hone those fermenting skills, as well as to find a way to introduce a new health-boosting ingredient into your kitchen, and since you are making your own vinegar, the flavour options are truly endless. Best of all, once you have found your favourite flavour, you can keep on making it.

My personal favourites are pineapple skin vinegar, apple scrap vinegar and grapefruit vinegar. I recently had the opportunity to make vinegar at home with a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeasts) and compare that with my basic "3 ingredient recipe" I normally use, but I will get more into that a little later on, first I want to share with you my basic recipe for making fruit vinegar at home, to help to get you started.



To get started, I recommend that you have the following tools at hand:
  1. A sterilized jar, big enough to hold all your ingredients
  2. A fermentation weight - or something you can easily sterilize use to weight down the fruit and keep it below the water level in the jar
  3. I recommend a mesh bag that you can place the fruit in for fermenting, it will help to keep all your contents together when submerged
  4. A tight woven cloth and elastic band to cover the top of your jar - you can also place the lid on the jar as long as it is kept on loosely, to allow for air flow
Remember to sterilize everything that you use during this process, you don't want any mould or bad bacteria to ruin your vinegar ferment. If mould does form, you cannot consume the vinegar at all.

Ingredients for a basic vinegar - you can increase or decrease your contents as much as you prefer, but I do recommend keeping it to a 1:1:1 ratio as much as possible, so keep your basic recipe as follows:

  1. 1 x cup of sugar
  2. 1 x cup of fruit, pulp or juice
  3. 1 x liter of water 
The process:

  • Step 1: Boil about 1 third of your water, and stir in the sugar until it dissolves. Add in the rest of the water, and leave to cool to just above room temperature - you really want your water to be WARM for all the beneficial natural yeasts and bacteria to do its thing, not cold or hot.
  • Step 2: If you are using fruit pieces or pulp, place them in your fermentation bag and place the bag in your sterilized jar. Pour your warm water over the fruit. Use your weight to keep the fruit completely submerged, you do not want any pieces of fruit floating to the surface of your ferment and opening an opportunity for mould to form. If you are using juice, simply pour it into the jar with the warm water.
  • Step 3: Cover the opening of the jar with your cloth and place the elastic bands over it to secure it in place. Making vinegar is an aerated ferment, this means air flows in and out of the jar, the cover is there primarily to protect your ferment from dust and insects.
  • Step 4:  Place on a shelf at room temperature. You can check on it from time to time to make sure no mould has formed on the top, you can also do a bit of a taste test every 4 weeks - though you will definitely begin to smell when it is becoming vinegar. Leave it like this for 3 months. (Wait... that seems like an awful long time, remember to read all the way to the bottom of my post to find out how to speed up this process!)
  • Step 5: After 3 months you can remove the fruit contents from the jar, and give it a taste test. If you are happy with the strength of the flavour of your vinegar, you can bottle it and place it in the fridge or cupboard. If you feel it still tastes a little "watery" you can place the cloth over the jar again and leave it to stand for up to another 3 months to strengthen and clear.
  • Step 6: Bottling - when you are ready to bottle your vinegar, make sure to first sterilize the bottles that you are going to use, as well as a funnel, which will help you with bottling, as well as any syphoning equipment you might be using. You can then syphon out the vinegar into the bottles, making sure to leave behind the sediment and dead yeast that will be sitting at the bottom of your jar (add this to your compost or any plant fertilizers you might have).
You can store your vinegar in your grocery cupboard as it is a preserved product and doesn't necessarily need to be refrigerated. Technically it doesn't have a limited shelf life, but if you want to be safe and give it a shelf-life, you can give it 6 months.


And now... for the moment you have been waiting for, how to ferment your fruit vinegars even FASTER...

Recently I was gifted a fermenting Mother, also known as a SCOBY - which stands for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeasts. I decided to give it a try and see how it affected my vinegar ferment.

To say my mind was blown away, is putting it mildly. After just one month, I had an amazing, ready to bottle vinegar. Not only that, but the flavour was phenomenal. It was a grapefruit vinegar, and the grapefruit flavour is just absolutely beautiful. I will definitely be adding this vinegar to my summer salads.

I will also definitely be fermenting my vinegars with a SCOBY going forward, and I do recommend if you can get your hands on one, to do the same.


If you would like to find out more about my vinegar ferment with a SCOBY, feel free to watch this YouTube video:



 




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