Home › The Cherry › Cherry Vinegar
Cherry Vinegar
Cover several bushels of mashed cherries with water and let stand forty-eight hours in a tub. Drain and press through a bag. To the resulting liquor add half as much water and to each half-gallon of the mixture two ounces of sugar. Let ferment.
DRIED CHERRIES No. I Stone and spread in thin layers on earthenware; sprinkle sugar over and dry in slow oven, the hot sun, or fruit-dryer. DRIED CHERRIES No. 2 Stew cherries with a little sugar (no water) then spread on earthenware and dry in slow oven. Cook down the syrup and when the fruit is dry pour it over the cherries, a little each day till all is used, drying again in the oven and repeating till all the syrup is used.
Three separate procedures crammed into one entry: a fruit vinegar built on the cherry pulp left over from juicing, and two methods of oven-drying. Both are workable at kitchen scale once the units are translated.
- Several bushelsA bushel of cherries runs roughly 50-56 lb, so the original is written for an orchard glut; the recipe itself does not say whether the fruit is whole or the pulp left after juicing. The ratios are what matter: mashed fruit covered with water, then the strained liquor cut with half its volume of fresh water, then 2 oz sugar per half-gallon. Scale to 5-10 lb of fruit and a food-grade bucket.
- The sugar is very lowThe added sugar is low -- two ounces per half-gallon is roughly 3 percent by weight of added sugar, though the cherry liquor carries some sugar of its own. Either way this is a low-alcohol ferment, and since Acetobacter converts alcohol to acetic acid at roughly a 1:1 ratio, expect a thin, weakly acidic vinegar. Modern fruit-vinegar practice generally uses more sugar to reach a higher starting alcohol.
- Do not use it for pickling or canningHome-fermented vinegar of unknown strength must not be substituted for the 5 percent commercial vinegar that preserving recipes assume. Treat this as a table or salad vinegar unless you titrate it.
- Cover, but do not sealAcetic fermentation needs air; a closed jar stalls it and can build pressure during the alcoholic stage. Cover the vessel with cloth against fruit flies. Discard the batch if you get fuzzy colored mold rather than the flat gray-white film of a vinegar mother.
- Press through a bagA jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth in a colander. Squeeze hard; the pulp holds a surprising amount of liquor.
- Slow oven300F at the outside, and 250F or lower is better for drying. A modern oven set to its minimum with the door propped an inch, or a dehydrator at 135-145F, does the job without scorching the sugar.
- Stone, and choose the fruitStone -- "stone" means pit. Spread the fruit in a thin single layer; on bare earthenware it will stick, so use parchment on sheet pans.
- The glacé methodNo. 2 is candying by stages. Each pass of syrup raises the sugar concentration inside the fruit while the oven drives off water, which is why it is done a little at a time over days rather than all at once. Rushing it gives you cherries with a wet, syrupy center that will mold.
- StorageDried cherries should be leathery and pliable, not crisp, and want a week of "conditioning" in a closed jar with a daily shake to even out residual moisture. The candied version keeps longest; both do best refrigerated.
Fruit vinegars are often said to have begun as a thrift measure rather than a delicacy: the mash left after pressing juice or wine still carried sugar and yeast, and letting it go to acid turned a waste product into a pantry staple for salads, shrubs and cooling summer drinks. Cherry pomace was especially worth saving on farms with a few sour cherry trees, which crop heavily and all at once. The two drying methods on the same page point at the other half of the problem this book was written for — a cook with no freezer and a tree dropping fifty pounds of fruit in a fortnight needed several parallel ways to absorb the harvest. The second method, syrup added by degrees over days, is the old confectioner's technique for glacé fruit, scaled down to a home oven and a piece of earthenware.