House of Vinegar: The Power of Sour, with Recipes [A Cookbook]

INTRODUCTION***Vinegar is so easy to make that it nearly happens without doing any work at all. It’s so easy, in fact, that, for thousands of years, wine-makers have been trying to develop ways to prevent wine from automatically fermenting into vinegar. Don’t think of this text simply as a how-to manual for making top-shelf vinegar or vinegar-based recipes. Consider it your guide to unlocking the potential of every sweet, salty, sour, and savory bit in your food. Believe it or not, acidic and sour foods like vinegar have the ability to open our senses and make our taste buds more sensitive to all the other tastes. At the same time, they also work to bring balance as well as tone down the intensity of overtly bitter and fatty foods.As a species, we are hardwired to taste sour foods. Some biologists feel that we evolved this ability in order to know if high-energy foods such as fruit were ripe. Unripe fruits don’t have the fully developed sugars we need to consume for instant energy. If we can taste their sourness, then we know to wait a little longer before eating them. On the other hand, there are some biologists who believe we developed this ability to warn us of potentially hazardous foods. Some spoiled foods can accumulate organic acids, and some really acidic foods can actually physically harm us. I’ll leave it to the scientists to figure out the reason for our ability to taste sour foods, but with either of these concepts, sour takes on a “forbidden fruit” quality.My working understanding of sour taste is from years of eating and cooking. I remember when my kids were little and just starting to eat solid food. Amelia and I would give them slices of lemon to gnaw on. With each bite, they would pull back from the lemon and intensely pucker their faces. What looked like displeasure would instantly fade into a smile followed by another bite. This got me thinking about how we look to sour foods as a source of pleasure and enjoyment while eating. I mean, what kid doesn’t stuff their mouth repeatedly with Sour Patch Kids on a regular basis?We simply crave sour foods. This is evident in cuisines around the globe. From the Pennsylvania Dutch to the people of Shanxi Province in northern China, sour foods are an instrumental—actually fundamental—part of how we enjoy what we cook and eat. Why else would a fatty grilled sausage virtually beg to be slathered in a boldly tart brown mustard? Sour ingredients just have a natural way of making us happy. As a chef, it’s important to be able to craft and manipulate foods in ways that appease the diner. Vinegar makes this possible to do, to create balance in any dish. It’s so important that it has literally become the cornerstone of all my cooking.With all of that being said, let’s thank whoever produced that crappy bottle of vinegar I bought many moons ago. It was the best twenty-nine dollars I ever pissed down the drain.