The Adventures of Homemade & Infused Vinegars!

[Music] we have got so much going on here i've had a lot of requests for because i talk about my homemade vinegars all the time and so i've had a lot of requests about my vinegars so i thought i'd just make a short video on um and i do have some older videos but you know sometimes you just have to update your videos and since i've been having people ask about i thought we'll just do this again and we'll talk about a little bit but i've got so much going on here table and the reason i'm over here and not in the kitchen is because i'm having a little update done in the kitchen and the kitchens kindly tore apart just a little bit it's not a big overhaul or nothing it's just some more cabinets and stuff being built and i'm really getting excited about that but my vinegars i use a lot of vinegars making my homemade vinaigrettes um i like to make vinegar reduction to put over pork and chicken and stuff like that your fruit vinegars and even your herbal infused vinegars are really good just just a little bit poured over um vegetables or salad greens and stuff like that so i'm just going to show you a little bit of how i make my vinegars and i want to show you one this is one of my oldest vinegars and when i tell you what it is you're going to say that's not the right color but this is strawberry vinegar and i've had this a couple of years um the reason it's not red and strawberry looking anymore is because it is pure d vinegar now i keep my vinegars out in my pantry because i have so many i can't just put them all in my refrigerator but if you once you uh make your vinegars and they're done and it's vinegar you've went through that process you can strain them and store them in your refrigerator and they'll stay sweeter that way if you do like i do and just keep them out in your in a dark place in your pantry with a good lid on it and remember when you're making vinegars or you've got infused vinegars you don't want to put just a metal lid on top of there without maybe putting plastic on it first or using one of these plastic lids i don't buy a bunch of these plastic lids because well i'm just too cheap so i'd rather use what lids i've got and just put plastic wrap underneath them and what that does it just keeps the lids from rusting but anyways this is my strawberry vinegar and i make a lot of vinaigrettes out of this and here in a minute i want to get closer to you because i want to show y'all the mother down here on the bottom you're going to look at it if you've never made homemade vinegar before you're going to think what is that in the bottom of my vinegar jar or jug and what that is is that's the mother of your vinegar and that's just strands of proteins and enzymes and the good bacteria that's so good for your for gut health and i've got a bottle of bought vinegar here and i'll show you that too it has the same thing it's got the mother down there this mother doesn't look as good as the homemade one but if ever i run out i of course i always keep extra anyways but uh this is organic simply nature apple cider vinegar and it has a it has a small mother not much of one down there and i've got some this is leftover apple cider vinegar i just put it in a this was sparkling water and it's a dark colored glass that's what i like to use i don't always have them but it's got a pretty thick mother down there on the bottom of this so it's doing really good now here recently i i was peeling some apples don't never throw your apple peelings away if you've got some kind of a jar just like this this is just a regular quart jar put your peelings in there make sure you wash your your apples of course put your peelings your cores in there and fill it up with water now for the top you want to make sure that your fruit stays emerged underneath that water because what happens is that fruit that comes up out of that water and not getting uh fermented it's liable to mold and get kind of gross looking so if you got one them little uh them little glass things that you put down for like holding your sauerkraut and stuff down that might fit and you can even put just like a maybe a little a glass a little bitty glass that doesn't have a handle on it you can put that down on top of it what i do is i take them little bitty um ziploc bags put a little bit of water in and then i kind of put it down on top to where it's holding that fruit down underneath that water just like i do my sauerkraut and this one is about two weeks old and down here on the bottom it's pretty cloudy when i see it's cloudy like that it's not done to me so i know that i'm just gonna put my little uh miss tammy from little jordan farm made these for me and it's just material and she's made them for my jars and uh but you can use anything just take some kind of a light material that's breathable and put it on top of your jar put a rubber band about it or just tie it or whatever you want to do and this has been up in my pantry and it's doing good there's no mold on top if you look at it and there's mold and it's just stinking and looking bad throw it out but if you look on top and there's just some little white bubbly looking scum that vinegar is okay it's still fermenting so you didn't just get that scum off and cover it back up and put it back up there and the way i tell when i know that my vinegar is where i want it is when it when it turns from this cloudy look and it gets clear again then it's where i want it and i'll strain it and i'll put it i'll clean my jar put it back in my jar or a different container uh put a plastic lid on it or put some wrap over it and then put your metal lid on it if you're going to use that and either store it in your refrigerator or in your pantry there's nothing hard about it at all now i like to say like this this was a extra virgin olive oil and you can see how dark that bottle is and that's kind of what i like to use for my vinegars so i saved this one cleaned it good and saved it just like the sparkling uh water bottle but i've got all kinds of vinegars here i need to kind of regroup here and get myself together sometimes you'll hear me talk about making my own vinegar and also infused vinegar infused vinegar doesn't take five minutes to make and to me it's uh it's just a wonderful thing to have in your pantry um because you can use it for so many things you can infuse it with anything that you want with that with any kind of fruit or herbs and it's just delicious i'm going to show you for instance this is a infused vinegar which means i used white wine vinegar you already got your vinegar you're not making homemade vinegar you're making infused vinegar you can use just regular distilled white vinegar and it does work um but it's real it's gonna overpower your herb is what i'm trying to say the regular white vinegar is just gonna overpower it that's what you're going to taste before you taste the herb when i want to make infused vinegars i want to taste the herb and then the vinegar so your best bet is to use white wine vinegar because it's just milder or you can use red wine vinegar rice wine vinegar so this has got rosemary and it only it just has the stems and it's just got a few rosemary leaves in there this is delicious to make to reduce it and pour it over a little bit of chicken or potatoes like roasted potatoes making a vinaigrette it's just i just love having it and also you can use just a little bit of this to put in your cleaners when you're your surface cleaners because that's what i use on my bar and around my stove and stuff this right here is an infused vinegar that i use white wine vinegar and it's lemon balm and i use this um mostly uh well for some vinaigrettes when you want that lemony taste and i also can put just a little bit in my surface cleaners you can use it and reduce it down a little bit and and pour it over a meat a piece of chicken or a vegetable or something like that this infused vinegar now this is just regular white vinegar because this is lemons and oranges and um lemon balm and rosemary and i can't think of nothing else that might be in there but this is what i use most the time when i make my homemade cleaner i don't always make a big bottle of it up i use it as a go and i put me a couple of tablespoons in my spray bottle fill it halfway with water and this is what i use to clean my surfaces with so i've always got this in the pantry when it starts getting low i just add when i take two tablespoons out i put two tablespoons of vinegar back in there that's why i've always got it this one right here is pineapple and this is homemade vinegar all that is is the cores from some pineapples we were eating a while back and i just put some water in there with them and they just been sitting up there and it finally got to the point i thought it was infused enough that it was it it tasted good it smelled good it is pineapple vinegar yes so at that point now you say now how come you don't strain that well the longer i it's pickled the pineapple is pickled and the longer i leave it in there you know but you can see there's no mold there's nothing causing me to have to strain that yet but if i wanted to i could just take it out at this point strain it and put it in the refrigerator or put it right back in my pantry this is another pineapple vinegar homemade all it was was a big core out of a big pineapple covered with water and i think i might just put like a teaspoon or so of sugar in it and that was just to feed the fermentation i use this all the time to make my vinaigrettes with it is one of my favorites let's see this one is raspberry i believe yes this is my raspberry vinegar i had a bunch of raspberries fresh raspberries last summer and it was just i washed them good put them in my jar cover them with water put a white on it to keep the raspberries down in the water and put my cloth over it with a rubber band and put it up in my pantry and about four weeks later i strained it off now if i'd put this straight into the refrigerator it would be sweeter but like i said i could just keep it in my pantry and uh but this makes wonderful vinaigrette too especially if you're making some kind of a salad that has strawberries or or blueberries or something like that in it and this is my blueberry vinegar and i'm going to be showing you how i'm going to add to this to make because you can see it's getting pretty low and i want to make more so i'm just going to add to this one but right now what we're going to do and you can use any size jar you want to this is a pickle jar that was emptied and i'm just going to take in fact i think i'll get you all down closer so you can see more of what i'm doing i'm going to make homemade apple cider vinegar and i'm going to do it in this half gallon jar you can do it in any size jar quart pint even a gallon if you've got that many apples now i can also tell you that my favorite as much as i love these my favorite is pear vinegar and i usually make that when we got pears coming off um so i'm going to really enjoy making more that's just one of my favorite now in making your homemade vinegars you can just use your peeling and the core or you can use the whole apple and usually what i'm doing when i make mine is i just use the peeling because that's usually when i'm cutting up apples to make a pie or for any reason that i'm cutting up a bunch of apples but this time i'm using the whole apple everything seeds core it don't matter skin the whole apple and if i had some fresh lemons it's not a necessity you don't have to do it i would even cut up a few lemons to put in here now if you can't if you don't have enough fruit to absolutely fill your jar to the lip and full to the rim it's still going to work you just need to make sure that your fruit stays emerged now you're going to know that after a few weeks a week week and a half your vinegar is going to look cloudy and that's fine that's the way it needs to look because it's going through that process of fermenting but if you look at if you check and look at it and there's any kind of black mold and it smells awful do get rid of it and start over and let me tell you i've had to do it before the temperature good for making vinegars is usually between 55 and 75 to 77 degrees i've tried to make vinegar sometimes in the summertime and i think my pantry may have been too hot or it may have been too cold when it's too cold your fermentation just does not do well and um i got some mold on top so i think that three pound bag of apples just filled my half gallon jar just like that now you can put your little bit of sugar in here to help feed your fermentation especially if you want to make a shrub which is a drink and that's something else i want to talk about um you can take a couple tablespoons and eight ounces of seltzer water or just water and maybe a little bit of honey and make you a shrub and drink that and you talk about good for your gut health it is really good you want to make sure when you're making your your homemade vinegars that you're using i'm using my well water you don't want to use city water because it's got stuff in it or use filtered water one the other so i don't know i'm hoping i got enough money money thinking about money i hope i got enough water here at the table with me to cover this yeah i think i do so that's just going to cover that now the one thing i don't have is something to weigh that down and what i'm going to do is just take me a little um probably one of my little snack bags put water in it and then i'm going to put it down in here to hold them apples down and then i'm going to put my cotton material over this and put a rubber band over it and it's going to sit up there in my pantry and it's going to sit anywhere from four to six weeks it just depends on how fast the fermentation goes so i got that done that is how easy it is to do apple cider vinegar okay this is my blueberry vinegar and i've already got some in here and i'm wanting to make more and this is a good way to keep your vinegars going is to take a little bit that you've already got and you can put it in another jar or just leave it in here and that'll get really get your fermentation going so i'm going to put some blueberries in here i got these blueberries from azure standard and they are really good really good blueberries they came frozen they're really good-sized blueberries and they're just really delicious so i probably got about a cup and a half that i'm gonna put in here with the vinegar that was already there and then i'm gonna just fill the jar up the rest of the way with water and then i'll cover it the same way now with it being blueberries it looks like they're going to stay underneath the liquid pretty good so all i'm going to have to do is put me a top on here put me a piece of cotton material over that and uh since it's already half well a little less than half vinegar already it won't take as long for that to turn into vinegar okay so let's make some infused vinegar and i'm going to use a quart jar and in this quart jar let me move some of this i told you i had a lot going on here so in this court jar i'm i went out to the herb garden and i want to make some basil and thyme infused vinegar to use with roasted potatoes chicken and vinaigrettes so i'm just going to take they've been washed dry them off really good so i'm taking my basil my lemon thyme and you can use dry or you can use fresh when you're doing infused now what i learned the hard way is when i made homemade vinegars out of herbs using just water in the herb it went rancid on me the fresh the fresh herbs and the water of course it didn't what i should have done is infused it but anyways we're going to be using vinegar to start out with so it's all going to be good so i'm using white wine vinegar we're going to cover these herbs up i should have got maybe another handful of herbs and i probably will go back out and get some more and i almost don't have enough vinegar so i think that's all i'm going to do for now now what you want to do too before you do your infused vinegars with herbs take your herb and bruise them real good i've done that while i was drying my herbs off you know just kind of rub them together and just press them and and really bruise them up good i could have done this in my pint jar but i wasn't thinking i need a bigger thing of white wine vinegar for sure and then fill this up with more herbs and i'll do that later but anyways that's as easy as it is to make infused vinegars but always make sure that your herbs are covered completely even with your already you know using vinegar so that's the difference between homemade vinegar and infused vinegar your infused vinegars you're already using vinegar it's already there and you're just infusing the vinegar with either fruit or herbs your homemade vinegars are your fruit and water that you're going to let ferment for several weeks and it's going to make vinegar so now what we're going to do we're going to make a little bit of vinaigrette and i'll show you how i use my vinegars and this is one way that i use them i'm going to put about a half a cup of olive oil and i'm going to pick my vinegar um i'm going to do raspberry shake it up just a little bit get all that the mother kind of stirred up and i'm going to put about a fourth of a cup of vinegar i'm gonna put me just a little bit of honey honey's optional but if you don't put some kind of a little bit of sweetener in it it's going to be kind of tart you can put raw sugar you can put if you use some kind of sugar supplement i just think the honey is really good in it i'm gonna put a little bit of pepper and i've got a good teaspoon of minced garlic right here it's going in and then i'm pretty much about out of mustard dijon mustard but you want about uh for this much about a tablespoon i don't know that i'm going to have a tablespoon in here but we'll get as much as we can out of it i'm not going to put any salt in here but i think i am going to put a little bit of thyme so we got pepper thyme garlic too much thyme i'm just gonna crush that up a little bit in my hand put it in there and that's it that's how easy it is to make a vinaigrette for your salads i forgot to bring my lid so i'm just going to stir it up good let's see if this one fits i think it's too little oh so we're going to shake it up [Music] we're going to taste it and it's wonderful of course so that's your homemade vinaigrette and it's that easy and i'll put the recipe down below and then so some hands that didn't really understand the process of homemade vinegars i hope that this helped y'all out just just a little bit at least it's just a very simple process i think people just get so intimidated by stuff like this but just know that we've all messed up i've had vinegars get moldy i just throw them out i don't know if y'all can hear that but we've got a pair of wild geese out on the pond they're flying off now mr brown's not here to see it i wish he was but i think it's a pair of wild geese that are wanting to settle down and mate and want to delay but they've been out on the new pond so anyways that was fun but so the adventure of making vinegar it's a it's a very easy process and the more that you've got out in your pantry all these different vinegars and y'all very heard me say this before the more yeasty beasties you got out in your in your kitchen and i mean it's everywhere in the air and it helps the fermentation of your your other vinegars so don't be intimidated by it if it don't work throw it out and try again but like i said it needs to be between 55 and about 75 77 degrees for things to ferment very well so the difference between infused vinegars is you're already taking vinegar already made vinegar and infusing it with fruit or herbs if you're making homemade vinegar you're taking distilled water or your well water and you're taking your fruit and fermenting it for several weeks and that's how you're making homemade vinegar so if you have any questions but feel free to ask me i'm still really busy of course everything that's going on right now and i want to touch base with the i mailed off the last of my cookbooks at the beginning of this week and that was all that i had but i've got a bunch more in print right now they're trying to get them printed right now and it could take a couple of weeks before they get them shipped to me so if you've already sent me a payment but you haven't gotten your cookbook probably by the beginning of next week that means you're on the second order and you will be getting them i'm not i'd really don't want to take any more payments at this time right now um i want to wait i want to get all these mailed out when i get my second order and then um from that point we'll we'll go from there because i think i'm gonna have to take a different avenue with my cookbooks as i keep going with them i'm going to have to get some help i'm not sure how i'm going to do it if i'm going to do it through amazon or different companies not sure but like i said if i've still got i've still got about 800 more orders to fill and you may be one of those 800 and you're on the next order so just know that uh if if you don't get it here pretty soon that means you're on the next order and i want to tell y'all how much i appreciate it it just really humbles me and makes me happy and it makes me want to venture more into it get more set up on it and and i really do want to do a canning and a bread baking and just i want them to be small i want them to be easy for people to follow and not intimidating so that's what i want to continue with so just bear with me i will get your cookbooks to you but like i said i really don't want to take any more payments right now until now when i announce it and say oh i'm ready come on then uh it'd all be good but like i said i might be set up a different way by then but if you sent me a payment and it's here and it's waiting it's waiting for the books to come in and as soon as i do um we're going to be like duck dynasty and we're going to set up a family a family i don't know what all of us and we're going to sit down we're going to fill these orders and then from that point i want to find the easier way to try to distribute my cookbooks i just tried to make it as personal as i could but i really enjoyed it and i just want to tell y'all thank you because it wasn't for y'all i wouldn't be doing none of this so from the bottom of my mr brown's heart uh we love you guys i hope this uh vinegar update or whatever you want to call it i hope it helps a little bit and we'll be back in a couple of days mr brown's wanting to go fishing tomorrow he may bring you a little bit of a river video so uh y'all take care this weekend have a wonderful weekend be safe and be blessed and we love y'all

Channel: Whippoorwill Holler

Views: 35,113

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Id: kkYTL-B-NBc

Length: 33min 45sec (2025 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 17 2021