Cooking Banner
Cooking HOME |
Brewing HOME
Class Prep |
Info and Class Handouts |
Recipes & Documentation |
Caid Brewer's Guild
Tim's brewing shop: The Brown Owl Brew Shop
Raspberry Vinegar - Recipe and Documentation
By: Lynnette de Sandoval del Valle de los Unicornios (Debbie Coyle)
Submitted for Guild Judging: Isles Anniversary November 16, 2024
Scored 89 out of 100 points
Creating a tasty raspberry vinegar is easy and involves only 3 ingredients!
The uses for your raspberry vinegar are many and varied: salad dressing, marinade, drizzled on vanilla ice cream, Yorkshire pudding, or a blue cheese wedge, in a recipe that contains vinegar, such as coleslaw, and my favorite: a refreshing drink as is, or mixed with your favorate water (still or fizzy), or lemonade, etc.
There are some ideas of how to use raspberry vinegar in cooking can be found here, and this Google search will net you more recipes.
Raspberry Vinegar Recipe
Ingredients
- 3 10 oz bags Simple Truth Organic frozen raspberries
- 2 16.0 oz bottles of First Street Premium Aged White Wine Vinegar
(6% acidity, Contains Sulphites)
- 1/4 cup sugar, or more to taste
Preparation
- In a large jar, combine ONE bag of raspberries, and BOTH bottles of vinegar
- 24 hours later
- Use a cotton cloth or coffee filter to strain the vinegar to remove the raspberries
- Squeeze the straining cloth to get all the liquid from the raspberries
- Add another bag of raspberries to the vinegar
- 24 hours later
- Use a cotton cloth or coffee filter to strain the vinegar to remove the raspberries
- Squeeze the straining cloth to get all the liquid from the raspberries
- Add the last bag of raspberries to the vinegar
- 24 hours later
- Use a cotton cloth or coffee filter to strain the vinegar to remove the raspberries
- Squeeze the straining cloth to get all the liquid from the raspberries
- Add sugar to the vinegar to taste,
stirring to disolve the sugar
- Pour into clean bottles or jars and seal tightly
- Refrigerate or store in a cool dark place; use within 6 months
Raspberry Vinegar Documentation
Vinegar History
While vinegar making, at least unintentionally, is probably as old as alcoholic brewing, the first
documented evidence of purposeful vinegar making was by the ancient Babylonians around 3000 BCE. The
Greeks and Romans also frequently used vinegar made from wine.
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella (234-149 BC) described the ingredients and process for making several
types of vinegar in his work De re rustica ("On Agriculture").
In the late Middle Ages, Orléans, France became famous for its vinegar which was made through a process
of fermentation and aging, this became known as the Orléans process.
Raspberries History
Raspberries are recorded by Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24-79) in his Naturalis Historia (Natural History).
They are also listed in John Gerard's Herbal (1597-1633).
Both authors refer to the Rubus idaeus (aka European red raspberry) species of raspberry that is
native to Europe and northern Asia.
Most of the modern commercial red raspberries, and likely the raspberries I used, derive from hybrids
between Rubus idaeus and Rubus strigosus (American raspberry, a species native to much of North America).
Raspberry Vinegar History
Throughout the history of vinegar, cultures have mixed it with various ingredients to create refreshing
drinks.
To name a few:
- Ancient Rome: Posca was made by mixing water and wine vinegar
- Persian: Sekanjabin is made of honey and vinegar
- Greece: Oxymel was a wine made from vinegar and honey
Fruit or berry flavored vinegars, called shrubs, date back at least to the 1600's where vinegar was used
to preserve fruits and berries in England.
Given the age of both vinegar and raspberries, and the history of vinegar's use as a drink and flavoring,
it is not a large leap to imagine that there were raspberry vinegars during the Middle Ages.
Recipe History
The recipe I used is modeled after a recipe published in 1860 in The Virginia Housewife:
Put a quart of ripe red raspberries in a bowl; pour on them a quart of strong well flavoured vinegar--
let them stand twenty-four hours, strain them through a bag, put this liquid on another quart, of fresh
raspberries, which strain in the same manner--and then on a third quart: when this last is prepared,
make it very sweet with pounded loaf sugar; refine and bottle it. It is a delicious beverage mixed with
iced water.
I don't know that adding the berries day by day is that much more effective than just putting them all
together in the first place and letting them sit for three days. I think the method used in the recipe might have been based on the size bowl available for making the vinegar rather than the effectiveness of adding them on different days. But for my first attempt, I decided to follow her recipe.
Bibliography
- Gerard, John. The Herbal or General History of Plants. The Complete 1633 Edition as Revised and
Enlarged by Thomas Johnson. New York: Dover Publication, Inc. 1975 (a reprint of Gerard's 1633 revision
of Gerard's 1599 work.)
- Randolph, Mrs. Mary. The Virginia Housewife. 1860, accessed via Project Gutenberg at
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12519
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Various articles. https://www.wikipedia.org
Brewing Footer
Lynnette (Debbie) |
Unicorn Fiber Arts |
Timotheus (Tim)
Questions? Comments? Whatever? Email
If these pages were useful or entertaining
Copyright by Debbie & Tim Coyle