[Sca-cooks] Re: Good brands of vinegar

[Christiane]

Sharon wrote:

If you'd like to have your own vinegar tasting, get 6-8 people or so to
bring a different kind.  Then taste it on some plain white bread.  Dense
white bread with a fine structure works best, but french or italian work
fairly well too.  Just avoid sourdough or strongly flavored breads.  I find
it works well to spoon the vinegar onto the bread rather than trying to pour
or dip it.
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Reminds me of Sunday dinners around the table; after sopping the bread in the rough red homemade vinegar, my cousin Laura would go into the kitchen and grab the bottle of artisanal balsamic my Uncle John had stashed away in there, and my Uncle John would notice and start yelling at her for wasting such expensive vinegar <g>.

Colavita is OK, but Regina is foul stuff.
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I have a white vinegar  that I really liked that seems to have a live
vinegar mother culture in it.  Does anyone have people in their local groups
who are into brewing and make vinegar (on purpose :-) )?  I have stopped
using that bottle and thought it might be fun to try and use some of it to
make vinegar.  However I don't know how to do this and would like to have
some advice from someone with experience so there will be less risk of
losing the vinegar strain.

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You need a homemade wine with preservatives to make vinegar; if you try and use a wine with sulfites to make vinegar, you will just kill your vinegar mother.

My dad's method: Take vinegar mother, put in large glass bottle with stopper that has a hole to let the gases out; add wine; put in cool, dark place; wait a week; check on vinegar strength; maybe wait longer. Pour out vinegar carefully through a coffee filter to get rid of silts and residues. When the mother gets too large, subdivide it.

Red wine vinegar in my grandmother's house was made from the infamous "dago red" my grandpa made (my uncle took over winemaking duties when my grandpa died. Grandpa had built the house with a cave; it had the barrels for the wine and the barrel for the vinegar. It also had Grandpa's still, where he made the rocket fuel, um, I mean, grappa. 

Gianotta