The Vinegar Cupboard by Angela Clutton

Author:Angela Clutton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472958105
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

One of the simplest, oldest ways of extracting raw juice from the apples for its alcoholic fermentation was to pile ripe apples into a hollowed-out tree or into a trough and just beat at them with sticks to release the juice. Left somewhere warm and damp, the naturally-occurring yeasts would organically ferment the apple into alcohol. To make vinegar, that now-cider would be left again to move to its next stage of fermenting into vinegar.

While there is a definite appeal to such a natural, hands-off way of doing it, for a farmer intending to use or sell the vinegar in any meaningful quantities, it came with various problems: of the alcoholic fermentation not being quite complete; of the process taking a long time; and producing a low yield of cider and vinegar. Farmers were understandably keen to embrace more sophisticated production processes as they came along, both in terms of making cider and then of turning that to vinegar. Speed and cost became the driving forces over time, with flavour the loser in that equation.

Modern craft cider producers are now re-embracing some of the old ways of making. There are some small-scale producers around who still have and are using again those old-style presses. In regions where cider vinegar has that kind of cider heritage it is not too hard even to find small-batch cider vinegar producers using traditional Orléans-style surface-fermenting, with its commercial disadvantages of a slow, low yield of vinegar, but a flavour upside.

AGEING OF CIDER VINEGAR

Ageing of cider vinegar after it is made can be of huge flavour benefit. Ideally it is done in wooden casks, just as wood is used for ageing balsamic or sherry vinegars. Or whiskies and wines come to that. The wood allows it to breathe in a way that stainless steel tanks (which are sometimes used) cannot. Those tanks which have rather less character about them and so allow rather less character to develop in the cider vinegar are better than no ageing at all, though. Or the very minimal one or two months that the mass-producers choose to ‘afford’. From their purely commercial point of view it is easy to see that ageing vinegar costs money in terms of production costs and just the basic factor of not having it out there on sale as fast as possible. Yet storing cider vinegar for a year or so knocks off its harsher flavour edges, to develop a rounder profile. The aroma develops. The colour changes. With the wood casks that allow some air through, additional reactions take place that develop deeper, fruity notes to the vinegar.

PASTEURISING AND FILTERING … AND THE ‘MOTHER’

A couple of other things matter when making cider vinegar. Actually, they matter when making any kind of vinegar, but especially cider because of its health-boosting momentum.

If a vinegar is to be pasteurised, this happens after the ageing (if there is any). Like any pasteurisation, the idea is to subject the vinegar to fast heat and wipe out any harmful pathogens.

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