Beechwood shavings once cut vinegar making from months to weeks
For most of history vinegar took months to sour. In 1823 Karl Sebastian Schüzenbach, working in the Kingdom of Baden, trickled alcohol over beechwood shavings and cut the wait to a week or two. A 20th-century method, submerged fermentation, later squeezed the job into a day or two, making cheap vinegar global.
The name comes from Old French for sour wine, and chemically vinegar is diluted acetic acid, usually between 4 and 18 percent by volume. Making it takes two fermentations: yeast turns sugar into ethanol, then acetic acid bacteria turn the ethanol into acid. Louis Pasteur was the one who identified those bacteria as the agents at work. Slow traditional methods, lasting months to a year, let a harmless slimy film of bacteria and cellulose build up, known as mother of vinegar; fast methods add that mother deliberately and pump in air.
Babylonians left the earliest documented record of vinegar around 3000 BCE, fermenting dates, figs, fruit and beer for cooking and medicine. In Zhou dynasty China, royal and noble households employed a specialist vinegar maker, and the region around Taiyuan in Shanxi is still famous for it. Spartans added vinegar to their black blood soup, where the acid kept the blood from clotting. Late medieval Orléans became renowned for a formal ageing method, England developed malt vinegar under the name alegar, and Modena began refining balsamic.
Balsamic contains no balsam. The traditional version, protected under a DOC label, starts with concentrated juice of white Trebbiano grapes and is aged 12 to 25 years through casks of woods such as oak, chestnut, cherry and juniper. Its sugars make it roughly five times as calorific as ordinary wine vinegar. The cheap balsamic of Modena sold worldwide since the late 20th century is usually grape juice concentrate mixed with strong vinegar and coloured with caramel.
In Japan, Matazaemon Nakano of a sake brewing family found that leftover sake lees could yield rice vinegar, feeding a growing taste for sushi; his firm, now Mizkan, is the largest vinegar producer on the planet. The Philippines relies on four traditional types, from coconut, nipa palm, kaong palm and sugarcane. In northern India, summer sugarcane sirka ferments in earthenware pots holding iron nails, which turn it blackish.
Source: Vinegar
