Making vinegar at home is not complicated, you only need one step.
For thousands of years, vinegar has been a mainstay in food and household. A real Swiss army knife in the kitchen, it brings acidity, helps to soften certain foods or make them healthy for consumption.
Very useful for the household, long before the advent of industrial household cleaners, vinegar was used to clean the house and make it livable for its inhabitants.
It is easy to make at home from any alcohol. All you need is some time and a cool, dark place to let it ferment.
Also critical for its manufacture, the mother of vinegar which brings the bacteria necessary to initiate fermentation. On Farmnetz you can find these home-made and often ancestral vinegar mothers, they are actually colonies of good bacteria that work to transform alcohol into acid.
First, you need the following ingredients:
- Mother of vinegar: A mother of vinegar is a film that forms naturally on the surface of wine when it is left (forgotten) in the open air for several weeks. We work with many people in the wine industry, this is how we enable them to sell online with just a few clicks. The mother is a collection of bacteria and yeasts that grow on the surface of the vinegar, giving the vinegar its characteristic appearance and taste.
- Wine that we want to turn into vinegar. It is possible to turn all kinds of low alcohol drinks into vinegar. Traditionally, vinegar is made from wine, cider or sometimes strong alcohol.
Then there is only one step:
- The easiest way is to add the proportion of 20% mother (liquid included) to the volume of alcohol. That is to say, if you have 1L (1000ml) of cider, you must add 200ml of unpasteurized vinegar to inoculate it.
Leave to ferment for several months, making sure that the liquid is in contact with oxygen. Ideally in a vinegar maker. Let the bacteria do their job In contact with oxygen, the bacteria eat the alcohol and transform it into acid. In doing so, they create a gelatinous film on the surface, the mother. Little by little, the wine turns into… sour wine.
Please note that fermentation takes place at room temperature and the liquid must be in contact with the ambient air to breathe!
