Vinegar

Regenerative Subsistence Flora Food & Medicine
#1

I’m kind of a gourmet, and when I cook (meats especially) I often like to slowly cook them in sauces, and lately that’s included some different types of vinegar, because I’ve been doing a lot of Filipino recipes. Vinegar seems like one of those thing that will make life more comfortable post-collapse, if you know how to make it. Luckily, I found this video recently. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEwOzhyVYyc

For those who don’t feel like clicking, the process is simple. You need to get a culture from some flies, for which the guy on this video recommends sugar water and some sort of fruit peel (he used banana) in a suspended jar, left outside for awhile. The flies coming to snack on the stuff will leave behind vinegar bacteria, which will form a ‘mother’. You can then strain and deposit it in wine, beer, whatever you want to turn into vinegar, and see if it’s a good tasting vinegar. A few tries might be necessary, as the occasional vinegar mother produces poor tasting vinegars.

Of course, we’ll need to know how to make wines and beers and stuff, since they’re the base of the vinegar. Link to the thread about brewing: http://www.rewild.info/conversations/index.php?topic=1138.0

#2

Ai din know it was that complicated… Ai thought you just made apple juice and left it to become first hard cider, then vinegar?

#3

That could work, assuming the right yeasts and bacteria get into it. But then you don’t know if it will be a good strain of vinegar or anything. This way, you can keep getting a few different vinegar mothers until you get one you like, and then keep making your vinegar from that (which is basically what is done at major vinegar producers).

#4

Interesting, I didn’t realize you could do that w/ flies.

Thanks for including the overview, I’m at work right now which filters out just about all streaming media (including youtube).