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Chili Pepper Vinegar
Half fill a half-pint can with small chili peppers (do not remove stone or seeds) and pour in red wine or cider vinegar to fill the jar.
Keep closed and in a dark place. The vinegar is ready for use in a week. It is used in soups and sauces, but a few drops are especially good in salad dressing.
A one-ingredient infusion that needs almost no technique, but a few details in the wording are worth translating.
- "A half-pint can"That is one cup, about 240 ml. A small canning jar with a two-piece lid works; so does any clean jar with a tight non-metal-contact closure.
- "Stone or seeds"Chillies have no stone. The instruction simply means leave the peppers whole and unseeded, since the placental tissue around the seeds carries most of the capsaicin.
- Which peppers"Small chili peppers" here means the little thin-walled red cayenne or bird types, dried or fresh. Fresh Thai chillies, red serranos or whole dried cayennes all suit. Use unblemished fruit; pricking each one once helps the vinegar reach the interior.
- The vinegar itselfUse vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, which is what keeps the jar shelf-stable. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid or homemade vinegar of unknown strength.
- Keep them under the surfaceThis is the hinge. Any pepper that floats above the vinegar can mould. Top the jar right up and add more vinegar as the peppers absorb it over the first days.
- VesselPlain glass with a plastic or lined lid. Bare metal caps and any copper or unlined aluminium will corrode and taint the vinegar.
- Time and strengthA week, as the recipe says, gives a light heat; leaving it longer will give a sharper vinegar. The peppers can stay in; strain them out if you do not want the heat to go on building.
- Yield and keepingRoughly half to two-thirds of a cup of finished vinegar, depending on how tightly the peppers are packed. Stored dark and cool it keeps a long time; discard it if the liquid turns cloudy or slimy or the peppers go soft and grey.
Pepper vinegar is the plainest member of a family of condiment vinegars — tarragon, garlic, celery, raspberry — that let a household keep a flavour on the shelf long before bottled sauces were cheap. In the American South a cruet of vinegar with a few small hot peppers standing in it was a fixture on the table for greens, beans and pot liquor, and it remains so; the commercial pepper sauces sold in slim bottles are the same idea industrialised. The logic of the method is that vinegar at full strength is itself the preservative, so the peppers keep without heat processing, sugar or salt — one of the few "put up" items a cook could finish in an afternoon and use within the week. The recipe offers red wine vinegar and cider vinegar as alternatives without comment.