Stop Making Strawberry Jam and Make Vinegar Instead
Once a year, everyone I know becomes a farmer. They plan ahead, have a picnic, grab a hat, and go to the farm to pick strawberries. Apartments fill up with sweet fruits you don’t eat in the field, people appreciate farm workers a little after spending the day hunched over, and we all end up making big plans for berries and dreaming about sweet berries. But mostly people go home, eat fresh berries and/or make jam.
I don’t know who eats all this jam and I hate handing out jars so I have tons of ideas on what to make instead, starting with my very popular strawberry vinegar. I’m going to offer two ways to do this – beginner and advanced.
Tools for making vinegar:
- Vinegar Mommy to Make It Really From Scratch: Supreme Red Wine Mother of Vinegar
- Large old bottle with airlock: 1-gallon FastRack jar with double airlock.
- Spoilage Prevention Tablets: Campden Tablets
Why is strawberry vinegar such a good idea? You are using more vinegar than you think. Of course, there are salad dressings and marinades, but the brightness is what you need more for cooking, and flavored vinegars are (good) expensive, so they’re not used as often as they should be. Do-it-yourself cooking means you have an endless supply, and you can afford to add a little soy sauce, add a little to gazpacho for sweetness, or add a little to grilled vegetables for an instant brightness that lights up Maillard. effect on vegetables. You can also use it to add a tangy sweetness to all your potato or coleslaw salads. The next time you roast vegetables on the stovetop, add some vinegar to brighten up the flavor. The point is, when you don’t think about how expensive a beautiful bottle was, you will find many more uses for flavored vinegar in your kitchen.
Quick Strawberry Vinegar
Ingredients:
- 1 liter apple cider vinegar
- 1 pint very ripe strawberries
- 1 teaspoon sugar
Peel the strawberries and add everything to the blender. Blend for 30-45 seconds (or more) if needed to keep the mixture as blended as your blender will allow. Let the mixture steep for 6 hours, then pour it through a sieve or strainer into a bowl. Bottle it up and it should be shelf stable due to the acid content.
The result of this process is a vinegar with a distinct strawberry flavor, but still having the pungency of apple cider vinegar, which is softened slightly by the sugar. All we’re doing here is flavoring apple cider vinegar instead of making real strawberry vinegar, which I’ll explain below.
Strawberry vinegar, long way
Ingredients:
- 3 pounds strawberries
- 2 pounds honey
- 1 liter of water
- 1 package wine yeast (You can use any yeast you like, sometimes I use champagne yeast, sometimes I use sour brewer’s yeast, but it’s not bread yeast to be clear.)
- 1 vinegar uterus
- 1/2 campden tablet
- 1 gallon bottle or jar with air lock
In this case, you are making strawberry wine and then allowing that wine to turn into vinegar. To begin, you will take a clean, stemless strawberry and place it in a heavy pot of honey and water. Let it boil, then cook for 20 minutes. You want the honey to dissolve. The strawberries will break, but not necessarily completely. Let the mixture cool to room temperature, then crush ½ Campden tablet with the back of a spoon or mortar and pestle and add to the mixture. Mix well, cover and leave for 24 hours.
When you return, you will add the yeast to the mixture. Just open the package and sprinkle yeast on top. Let it brew for five minutes and then mix. Now it’s time to add it to the bottle so it can ferment. Use the funnel to pour it into a clean bottle, then attach the sluice to it. Install it in a dark and cool place. After a few days, you will see it bubble up, causing the airlock to burst. This will continue for several days or up to a week. You want to wait until it stops bubbling completely.
If you have a refractometer or a way to measure ABV, now is a good time to check that you have less than 10%, but if you don’t have one, that’s fine too. You are usually in the correct range.
Remove the water seal and add the vinegar mat, then place the cheesecloth over the jug and tie off the top. This is done so that the wine is exposed to the air, but the bugs cannot get inside. Let the wine stand for 3-4 weeks, then taste it. You can continue to let it age this way, softening and evaporating along the way. The longer you keep it, the better it will taste. I usually let mine stand for about three months.
Now you can use it as you wish by decanting it little by little. Making it from scratch is more risky, it can go awry because fermentation is risky and there are a lot of steps involved. If you start to see green or blue mold, it has gone bad. If you see white mold it’s just Kahm yeast which isn’t a problem but doesn’t taste very good so you need to strain it, boil it and pick up where you left off (boiling gets rid of all the yeast so you need to add it back in) . But it’s also basically a hands-off process that’s very rewarding and results, if you do it right, in a much tastier and milder vinegar at the end.
Also, let’s be honest, you’ve never taken strawberry ice cream seriously.