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No, you definitely shouldn’t drink it. But to cook vinegar with your own hands for salads there, marinades and other culinary delights – why not? It will turn out, if not useful, then certainly less harmful than purchased diluted acid, and besides, it will be tasty, fragrant, “with character”. Moreover, there is not so much fuss with the preparation of this natural product – everyone can handle it!
Apple cider vinegar, along with wine, remains one of the most popular culinary spices. There are a lot of recipes for how to make apple cider vinegar at home – and, as usual, most of them are no good. What network “experts” don’t recommend: they put alcohol yeast into the wort and boil it, and they try to build something out of store-bought chemical cider – fear! We will not produce essences, but we will try to deal with the theory first, and only then we will find out a simple, but the only true way to make apple cider vinegar at home.
By the way, about vinegar for weight loss. Women’s sites produce information about the benefits of vinegar by the kilotons, it’s already scary! Say, you drink a glass or two of healing slurry a day – and the waist just melts, and the appetite disappears nowhere. Of course it disappears! You just added acetic acid, where is there already?!
Vinegar will help to lose kilograms in only one form – in a green salad without oil under the chicken breast, after a good workout. And real, home-cooked apple cider vinegar will try to make such salads not only healthy, but also very tasty! And please don’t drink vinegar on an empty stomach as the “experts” advise! This is the most harmful, especially for people with high acidity, of whom most of us are! Gastritis and ulcers, of course, contribute to weight loss, but do you need it?
How to make apple cider vinegar at home – recipes and problems
Want to make natural apple cider vinegar? Then immediately refuse store-bought ciders and apple wines – they, with a high degree of probability, are crammed full of preservatives. “Live”, recently made apple wine is best suited for making vinegar, even one that has just finished vigorous fermentation will do. Therefore, if you want vinegar, you will have to get confused with the production of apple wine or cider, read about them in the relevant articles. However, the technology for preparing the base for homemade vinegar allows some liberties compared to wine.
I emphasize again – to make vinegar, we definitely need alcohol! The thing is that Acetobacteraceae – acetic acid bacteria – “eat” ethyl alcohol, turning it into acetic and other acids, just as alcoholic yeasts eat sugar, forming alcohol. Only the process of wine production is anaerobic – without access to oxygen, but acetobacteria need this oxygen – haha – like air, otherwise no vinegar will come out.
Making vinegar can be fraught with a number of difficulties – however, they are all removable. We will try to determine how to make apple cider vinegar at home if you are faced with one of these problems.
- Vinegar souring does not start. More than one week has passed, and the expected sour smell and cloudy film on the surface still do not appear? There are several solutions: a) wait some more; b) add to the wort yeast uterus (read about it in the relevant section of the article); v) raise the temperature – the optimum temperature for the formation of vinegar – 26-35 ° C; d) forced infect the wort acetic acid bacteria.
Infection with acetobacteria is carried out with the help of fruit flies, which carry these microorganisms on their paws. You can breed flies by cutting an apple and simply leaving it on the table. The method is radical and not acceptable for everyone, but effective.
- Vinegar turns cloudy. It happens, and quite often. Options for solving the problem: filtration through a cotton wool, exposure, filtration, again and again filtration. If you are too lazy to mess with the filter, take only clear, well-clarified wine. However, cloudy vinegar is in no way inferior to light vinegar except for aesthetics.
- Insufficient content of acetic acid. The reason is either the souring is not over yet, or you took too weak wine. Acetobacteria feed on alcohol. So how do you make homemade vinegar from apples that haven’t fermented enough ethylene? Regular sweet apples contain about 12% sugar, which gives us about 7% alcohol in wine. With further vinegar souring, these 7 ° will turn into 5% vinegar – what you need for kitchen purposes! Accordingly, with the right technology, vinegar will not require any yeast or additional sugar.
And a little about yeast. In most cases, these very 7 ° can be fermented without yeast – that is, on wild yeast contained on the apples themselves and in the air. If for some reason the “savages” refuse to work, the must will have to be infected artificially. Only I ask you, do not take baker’s yeast – they are only suitable for sugar moonshine! Buy specialty wines or ciders from the wine shop – 1.5 grams of CFA per liter of juice will be enough.
How to make homemade apple cider vinegar – a time-tested recipe!
I give a complete recipe, including the manufacture of young apple wine, and its subsequent transformation into vinegar. If you already have apple wine, just skip the first five steps.
So, we take ordinary sweet apples, for a start we will try to do without sugar and CKD. About 600 ml of vinegar should come out of a kilogram of such apples – the rest will go to “shrinkage and shrinkage”.
- We extract juice from apples in any convenient way. You can squeeze through a juicer, cheesecloth, colander, you can grind, for example, with a meat grinder and leave for a couple of days until the wort ferments, and only then squeeze out – as you prefer.
- We try the resulting juice. It should be sweet enough and not too sour. If there is a lot of acid, add a little clean unboiled water, up to half a liter per liter of juice. If there is little sweetness, feel free to add sugar, 50 grams per liter will be enough for a start.
- Cover the must with gauze and leave in a warm place. After 1-3 days, signs of fermentation should appear – foam, hiss, kvass smell. If this does not happen, you will have to buy wine yeast or, at worst, make raisin sourdough – you can learn all about it in this article.
- We cover the fermented wort with a water seal, in extreme cases – with a rubber glove with a hole in the finger. We leave in a warm (18-23 °) dark place until the end of fermentation, this process can take from a week to four.
- When the shutter stops bubbling or the glove is deflated – the liquid should be decanted – removed from the sediment with a tube.
You have received young apple wine. If it is light, you can immediately start making vinegar. If turbidity is observed, before making apple cider vinegar at home, it is better to keep the drink under a water seal in a cool place for another month, periodically repeating decanting, until the wine is completely clarified.
- We put the finished raw materials for vinegar in an open container with a wide neck, covered with gauze, in a warm (26-35 °) place. After 3-7 or even more days, vinegar souring should begin by itself – the wort will begin to emit a characteristic sour smell, and a film will appear on its surface, resembling a film on a cooled tea, with dirty “kerosene” stains – that’s right!
- Then everything is simple – time will work for us. After 2-4 weeks, the smell of the liquid should intensify, become completely unpleasant – which means that everything is going according to plan, we just have to wait.
- After 3-5 weeks, the souring process should end. This can be determined by the precipitation of a dense dark precipitate, clarification of the liquid and a change in smell – now it will already resemble vinegar. Time to filter the almost finished product and pour it into a sealed container – there is nothing for him to weather for nothing! Before use, vinegar is recommended to be kept in a cool place for a month or two.
How to store homemade apple cider vinegar? Just like any other – just in the pantry or kitchen cabinet. If the product came out not acidic enough (this can be checked by taste) – it is better to move it away from sin in the refrigerator.
A little about the vinegar uterus
Sometimes when preparing apple cider vinegar, the so-called “womb” or “vinegar mushroom” appears in the container. It is formed from the same “tea” film on the surface, gradually grows and turns into some kind of dense jelly-like substance. Although this “mushroom” looks like rubbish rubbish, you shouldn’t throw it away in any case – connoisseurs of vinegar for a vinegar uterus, pardon the pun, they will sell their mother – a valuable thing.
If you are lucky and the uterus has grown, you need to carefully collect it from the surface, place it in a jar, pour a small amount of vinegar (only apple) and store it like the apple of an eye at room temperature. In the future, it will be possible to prepare vinegar from this jelly using a simplified technology – just add a little mass to the wine that is supposed to be acidified, then the souring process will begin and go much faster, and the vinegar itself will be of better quality and tastier than usual.
You can use the uterus repeatedly, but under certain circumstances it can die – a “lethal outcome” is diagnosed by the darkening of the mass and by its position in a jar of vinegar – a dead “mushroom” falls to the bottom. At the same time, vinegar does not lose its taste and other qualities.
So we learned how to make apple cider vinegar at home – the recipe, as we see, is not at all complicated, accessible even for beginners, the main thing is to have high-quality raw materials and a solid supply of patience. Remember – to be sure that you are consuming an exceptionally high-quality product, it is best to make it yourself!