Homemade Apple Scrap Vinegar
Update April 2013: Please check out my more recent post about scrap vinegar here with photos of the stages you’ll encounter and more tips based on my experience making successive batches of vinegars.
I’ll go ahead and just put it out there first thing. This is a project wherein everyone who lives under your roof needs to be enthusiastic, unless you have some sort of out-of-the-way cellar or garage that stays at or around 80 degrees F. You’re making vinegar. It’s going to smell like vinegar after about a week. Be warned.
There’s no specific recipe for this as you can make as small or large a batch as you have scraps.
My first batch of cider vinegar came from scraps that started out as apples simmered in water and then pureed through a food mill. I took a chance on the mealy skins and chunks, hoping that cooked vs raw would provide sufficient apple-ness in my soon-to-be vinegar.
;)
It worked for me, and I’m now working on another batch of cider vinegar, but this time with raw scraps. I’ll post an update after a month to let you know how it goes.
This method is based on Sandor Ellix Katz’s fruit scrap vinegar recipe from his fablulous book, Wild Fermentation.
Homemade Apple Cider Vinegar Recipe
1. Save those cores and peels from pies and apple preserving projects. Use organic apple scraps, or know your local apple grower’s spraying policies. For your first batch I’d recommend using between 5-10 apples’ worth of scraps. Use your cooked, apple butter scraps if that’s what you have. Freeze your scraps from smaller projects if you’d like and just use frozen scraps as you would with fresh (don’t worry about defrosting).
Place your scraps in your widest-base, food-safe container. Avoid aluminum or galvanized steel; the acidity level will rise as your vinegar ferments, you don’t want metallic compounds in your salads and marinades. An enameled stone crockpot bowl would be ideal, but stainless steel, food-grade plastic tubs or enameled cast iron/steel are good vessel options. Whatever you use, make sure it’s something you won’t need for at least one week.
2. The volume of sugar water will depend on how many scraps you have. Dissolve 1/4-cup sugar in 1-quart water. If that doesn’t cover your scraps then multiply that ratio by as many quarts as you need to completely submerge your scraps in sugar water. For the batch I started yesterday with scraps from 20lbs of apples, I needed 13 quarts of water with 3-1/4 cups sugar to cover my scraps. (Out with the trusty lobster pot/canner pot, again.)
3. Cover your pot with cheesecloth and let sit for one week. Be sure to swirl the pot or stir the scraps daily or mold will form on the surface. A good fermentation temperature for vinegar is on the warmer end (80 degrees F); if it’s cooler in your house expect the process to just take longer.
4. After a week has elapsed, strain out the scraps. Sandor said the liquid would darken, but mine didn’t really. I think that’s the product of my using mush, post-puree leavings; my liquid was always sort of cloudy. It did bubble over the week, though, a good sign that bacteria and wild yeasts were eating sugars and producing carbon dioxide (yay fermentation!)
The larger batch you do, the more straining prowess and ingenuity you’ll need. My juicing/straining tactic for jelly’ing came in handy.
;)
5. Return your strained liquid to a vessel large enough to contain it. Maybe that’s what you had the scraps in initially, or maybe you’ve found an even better vessel to free up your dual purpose lobster pot/canner pot for preserving other things.
Again, more exposed surface area with air will benefit your vinegar fermentation. Cover with cheesecloth (to keep fruit flies out of your vinegar) and let the liquid ferment over the next 2-3 weeks. Peek and give it a swirl every few days to make sure everything’s okay in there. It’s done when it tastes like cider vinegar. Be brave, give it a little slurp.
6. Bottle your vinegar and use it like you would store-bought, except for in waterbath canning. Don’t use homemade vinegar for pickling or preserving food in jars you plan to seal and store at room temp. Acidity levels in homemade vinegars will vary and a simple pH test strip might not give you a reliable reading of the pH of your vinegar. Be safe my friends. (I’d use this vinegar for pickles you make and keep only in the fridge, though.)
I scooped up some of the ‘mother’ (see below for more info) and put some in each jar. You can strain her out if you’re not cool with live bacteria keepin’ it real in your jar. Check out Bragg’s for further reading on this topic.
;)
Things I learned from my first batch:
1. I didn’t have a control group, nor any prior experience to base it on, but my feeling is that there was less sugar in my cooked scraps than had I used raw scraps, which is why it took about two weeks longer for the vinegar to ripen. It could also be because I made quite possibly the largest batch one can manage in a home kitchen with regular home containers. I also cooked out some of the naturally-occurring yeasts & bacteria that helps the fermentation process along. All this is to say, I’d probably just use raw scraps in the future.
2. This is not like making fermented pickles where you want to skim religiously, daily. As mentioned earlier in the post, at one point midway through the post-strain ferment, it got hot in my house (about 80 degrees F) and small clusters of mold formed on the top. As I skimmed those (definitely skim those), I noticed a film forming and thought I needed to skim that, too. Turns out that that’s the mother. It eventually sinks and grows. Not gross grows, just becomes more like what you’d see in a Bragg’s bottle. I made a mother!
3. I definitely need more vessels and one can never have too much cheesecloth. Floursack towels make great cheesecloth substitutes.
;)
If you give this a try, I’d love to hear how it goes for you.
Kate
Good questions from Klynn:
“I had previously read that yeast must be added, but apparently this is not so? Also, What do you do with it when it’s done? Can it be stored room temp or should it go into the fridge? And does it need to be processed before storage?”
No added yeast, as we’re relying on wild yeasts in the air, which do their job superbly. When it’s finished, store it in clean smaller bottles (or in one large one) capped at room temp. The yeasts and Acetobacter have eaten all available sugars and produced a shelf-stable vinegar. Processing it will kill the live microorganisms. Raw vinegar will last indefinitely, but the flavor will evolve over time.
Fermentation, Fruit, Preserved Foods: Savory, Recipes, Reusing
Reader Comments (56)
Hi! I made vinegar that turned our pretty good, but now I'm having a hard time figuring out how to store it. I put it in bottles with flip top lids (like for home brewed beer or soda) and when I opened it a day later it had built up A LOT of pressure and fizzled non-stop for a long time. I don't want to pasteurize it because I want to keep the healthy probiotics alive, but I'm afraid if I keep it sealed up it will explode! I've looked around, but can't seem to find any info about anyone else having this problem. Any ideas? Thanks!
Amanda, I've found storage in a mason jar to be a good solution to that issue. If it continues to ferment or any heat/residual sugar is causing pressure to build, the mason jar is designed to release that pressure and not explode. I just started storing my daily use homemade vinegar in a swing top, but we use it frequently which 'burps' it regularly to avoid pressure build up. Hope this helps!
Am trying now, but I think did something wrong. There are bubbles on the top, but the apples chunks float at the top and the batches smell like rotten apples. I strained the apples out and am letting the liquid sit covered.
The liquid is very light.
Should I start over?
Hi there!
I've been making lots of vinegars with different fruits but lately most of them form mold pretty soon (we are in the middle of winter, all the other vinegars where made in summer), one of them made of table grapes developed a mother but has mold all around it (like a blueish/whitish border all around the mother, it is actually beautiful)...I'm not sure whether I should cut this from the mother and leave the mother in or should I throw the entire mother or even the entire batch! I have read different things about mold: in some places it says just skim it (but it always comes back!) and in some places it says you need to throw the entire batch and sterilize the container so it doesn't reproduce into the next batch...
A spray bottle filled with any type of vinegar will work on them, but they do seem to prefer the apple cider kind. What I can’t figure out is why they’re congregating in perfectly clean areas of my home. I’ve gone on a quest for rotten apples (I have three kids) or other attractive-to-flies items and found nothing, yet they’re hovering my closet, which has no doors, my office, and a few other areas of the home. I have put vinegar and bleach down my drains at different times and made sure the garbage was taken out. Thank you for this list of traps. I’ll have to set some for them and hope for the best.
Sorry for my slow response!
Diane, perhaps you left the apples in too long? They really only need a week for the mixture to become boozy enough to then turn into vinegar. Light colored is not a problem as it darkens as it gets exposed to oxygen and ages. If you still have it going, I'd keep it going and see if it starts to smell like vinegar.
Silvia, I wonder if the winter conditions are slowing down the production of alcohol, thus making it not quite boozy enough to fend off mold after you strain in a typical vinegar. Have you tasted after you strain to see if it's alcoholic in flavor? I'd not worry about skimming white mold off, but if it turns various colors, I'd pitch the batch and try to see what's causing it. If you need to pitch a mother, just add a splash of a live cultured vinegar to keep the process going, you'll likely end up creating another mother pretty quickly if your base was alcoholic enough.