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Vinegar the survivor

by Margo True, Sunset food editor

Recipe Editor Amy Machnak sips fresh homemade vinegar.

In our last post, we on Team Vinegar confessed to neglecting our project, to underfeeding the vinegar bacteria with fresh wine. We were pretty sure that two of our "mothers" had died from outright starvation.

Well, I'm happy to report that we tasted our vinegars a few days ago, and the jars with the seemingly expired mothers (the 1-gallon mason jars) actually yielded delicious vinegar. Very tart, strong, fruity, full of character. It was so much better than red-wine vinegar you buy at the store—just as our consultant, Paula Wolfert, had promised. And there actually were mothers in those jars—the barest shimmer on the surface.

Interestingly, the two wider (3-gallon) jars, which produced much thicker, visible mothers, made a vinegar that tasted good, but not as wildly fruity and tart as the Disappearing Mother jars. We pondered this, and realized that a) acetobacteria and their mothers (their cellulose "homes"), grow best with lots of oxygen, which of course the wider jar provides; and b) we should have fed the wider jars more often. The muted flavor is probably a result of overconsumption by bacteria.

We ended that day happy. Vinegar is one tough foodstuff, the rubber tree of the food world.

P.S.: We inadvertently broke one of the larger jars, so we threw out the contents, pouring them into a colander first to catch any chunks of glass from going down our garbage disposal. At the bottom of the jar were layers of spent mothers. They looked sort of like bologna. Or...well, you decide:

They're actually not bad to handle—just a little bit rubbery. Kind of like fruit rollups.

From Team Vinegar: Mother, where art thou?

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

When Team Vinegar huffed its way to the Sonoma mountaintop home of renowned cookbook author Paula Wolfert in February and procured pieces of her precious, 40-year-old mother, we had every intention of being good caretakers of that weird but precious stuff. We meant to feed it with fresh red wine regularly, closely monitor the temperature, and sniff it now and then to make sure it wasn't starting to smell like furniture polish (the death knell, according to Paula).

Reader, we are guilty of neglect.

Hey, we have busy busy lives! Shoot, we've only fed it — by my haphazard records — four times since it came to live with us. Correction: Me. The jars sit in my office, in two cardboard boxes. I have to keep telling visitors that the strange smell isn't my feet, it's the vinegar.

Vinegar is supposed to be fed, according to Paula, every 1 1/2 weeks. Yikes. We last fed it on April 1. Here are some photos from that time.

Where are the mothers?

Now, if a developing vinegar is properly fed, the mother will appear on the surface as a thickish, solid layer. She is made up of pure cellulose and acetobacter — a nifty bacteria that converts alcohol into vinegar. By the way, the mother is completely harmless, if kind of slimy. When we're ready to use the vinegar, we'll just strain her out.

But I digress. As you can see from our 1-gallon mason jars above, no mother is to be seen. Failure! So many things could have killed this mother--too much wine poured in at one time (thereby "swamping" it), long periods of starvation, we just don't know.

Then we pulled out our other two jars. These are humongous 3-gallon things we found back in our dusty storeroom. They are very wide, and maybe that is why — as you can see below — the mother has formed a healthy pink presence:

A well-established mother.

At least two mothers have survived out of four, against the odds. But sometimes the dead spring back to life (at least when it comes to vinegar). We'll see...we'll be feeding them soon (the guilt is becoming too much to bear).

Making vinegar: Our first feeding

Our homemade vinegar is brewing. Soon after returning with our "mothers," we moved them to bigger jars to start the feeding process.

We put each one in a mix of water and wine, then topped the jars with cheesecloth secured with rubber bands to keep out vinegar flies.

Note: If doing this at home, you might want to move the mother with a ladle, or wear gloves.

I used my bare hands and—even after scouring them with coffee, baking soda, and other supposed odor neutralizers—they smelled of vinegar for two days....

 

 

 

 

 

 

First step in vinegar making: finding our mother

By Julie Chai, Sunset associate garden editor

To season our One-Block Diet dishes, we decided to make vinegar with some of Team Wine's syrah. I’d always thought that making red wine vinegar was as simple as letting an opened bottle of wine go bad...but it turns out it’s not quite that straightforward.

So we looked to award-winning cookbook author Paula Wolfert—who’s written about and made vinegar and is known for her meticulous research—to guide us.

We field tripped to Paula’s Sonoma home for a vinegar-making tutorial and, over espresso and Valrhona chocolate, she explained why we should bother doing this in the first place: There’s no good red wine vinegar on the market. Commercial manufacturers can make it quickly, so they do—which means that rich, complex flavors never develop.

Paula had several crocks of vinegar in various stages of development, as well as a cupboard filled with bottles of aging vinegar. We sampled her 2006, 2007, and 2008 vintages—they all had far more depth than any I’d tried before—and I was convinced that the only way to get good red wine vinegar is to make it yourself.

To get started, we’d need a crock, red wine, water, and a key component: the mother. The mother is essentially a starting agent, and she’s a shape shifter—depending on her maturity, she can appear as a cloudy mass or a tangible liver lookalike that forms in the top of your crock. Along with her knowledge, Paula would share with us the mother that she’d gotten from a friend more than 40 years ago.

She plunged her hand into the vinegar crock and pulled out the mother, divided it into pieces, and put the pieces into small jars with a bit of mature vinegar. The mothers would be stressed from division so, when we got home, we were to transfer them to bigger jars and feed them water and wine. Then leave them to rest in a dark, warm place while they regained strength. We’d continue feeding our mothers and know they were back in action when they rose to the top of the jars.

Eventually mothers die, and sink to the bottom of the crock (you need to scoop out their remains if they start taking up too much volume.) But it’s no reason to worry—a new mother will form in the old one’s place.

Taking good care of our mothers is critical since they’ll ultimately decide whether we get vinegar or not. If we treat them right, we should be elbow deep in vinegar in just a couple months.