Let's talk about vinegar

Vinegar is as old as civilization. Records of humans using vinegar reach back to at least 5000 B.C. when the Babylonians were making wine—and vinegar—from dates. We've used vinegar for thousands of years, as a preservative, a pickling agent, a flavoring, and as medicine.

We still love the stuff. We use it on pasta and veggies, in marinades and dressings. Here in the Northwest, we have access to good local wine and excellent local cider, with which to make our own vinegars (for the adventurous) and any number of locally grown fruits, herbs, and other seasonings, to infuse otherwise ordinary grocery-store vinegar with some extra flavor and beauty.

The microorganisms in the air transmute the alcohol present in pretty much any wine, beer, or hard cider into acetic acid, and thus vinegar is born. Because vinegar does have preservative qualities, you don't need to worry nearly as much about bacteria, either. Making and using your own seasoned vinegars is easy as can be, it doesn't take scads of time or know-how, and you'll bring extra flavor to almost anything you care to cook.

You don't have to be a gourmet chef to appreciate a lovely wine vinegar, flavored with garlic and shallots, to dress salad or fish or greens. A savory herbed vinegar served with good quality olive oil is perfect for dipping pieces of that fresh, crusty loaf of bread you picked up to go with your salad or stew, for that matter.

To make your own wine vinegar, for example, you simply need a bottle of decent wine (an alcohol content between 10–12% is going to be about right to allow growth of the desirable microorganisms to perform their alchemy, but still be strong enough to keep well.) Red or white, it's up to you. You open the bottle, drink a glass or two, and leave the rest of the open bottle in an out-of-the-way, warmish spot on your kitchen counter for a couple of weeks. It's going to be a good deal more delicate than most of the commercial wine vinegar you can buy, so don't be too surprised when you taste it.

If you're like me, though, an open bottle of wine just isn't going to last very long in the kitchen. So I usually start with plain old store-bought vinegar, and add to it. Cider vinegar, wine vinegar, rice vinegar, distilled white vinegar, balsamic—experiment with all of them. Go for the flavors you love most: garlic, fennel, rosemary, sage, basil, shallots, mint, or almost anything else.

You can season vinegar with nearly anything. If you like the fruit vinaigrettes, you can make your own raspberry, blackberry, or pear vinegar by simply filling a wide-mouthed quart jar with the clean (and chopped, if need be) fresh fruit, and covering the fruit with distilled white vinegar. Now, some folks just pop that straight into the cupboard for a couple of weeks or a month and forget about it, other than to give the jar a shake, now and then. I'm a complete coward about botulism, though, so my personal rule of thumb is to store vinegars with "wet" flavoring ingredients in the door of the fridge, while they steep.

If I'm flavoring vinegar with dried fruit (like apricots, for example) or dried herbs, I'll usually just put it in a dark place like the back of the cupboard over the stove, and give it a shake every day or two, until I'm ready to pour the flavored vinegar off of whatever I have steeping in it. When you've decided the vinegar has taken as much flavor as you'd like (or as it's going to) you pour the vinegar through a strainer to lift out the bigger pieces, then if you'd like to remove more of the cloudiness, you can pour it through a funnel lined with a coffee filter into the bottles you plan to use to store your results.

Think about the flavors you enjoy most. This really is a trial-and-error process, and experimenting with different complementing flavors is more than half the fun. No batch will ever be quite the same as another, either, so enjoy to the fullest the unique character of each attempt. Bluntly put, vinegar isn't particularly expensive—so if you really hate the results, you're not squandering a small fortune. However, if you start with the herbs, spices, and other seasonings that are always in your kitchen, it's going to be difficult to go too far wrong.

Need some ideas for where to start? No problem. Here are some of my own favorites:

• A lovely, mild, wine vinegar, flavored with a cup or two of fresh, shredded basil leaves, is a lovely complement to fish, pasta, bread, rice, or salad.





• Or try wilting collard greens, fresh spinach, or kale in a savory cider vinegar you've flavored with onions, shallots, and garlic. You can top the resulting greens with some crisp, crumbled bacon, goat cheese, and chopped toasted hazelnuts.





• A handful of dried, shredded red chile peppers (you can just drop 'em in the blender to chop) with garlic and a generous sprig of rosemary or fennel makes a pungent, savory vinegar to serve with cold-cuts, meat, hearty sandwiches, or your favorite pasta dish.

Don't be afraid to experiment. Try different kinds of vinegars and be bold with your seasoning choices. Vinegar, after all, is about flavor, and enjoying Northwest flavors is why we're all here.