Homemade Fruit Vinegar

I was super bored a while back and I ran across a YouTube video of a guy who made his own vinegars. This was intriguing to me. I decided to give it whirl. I used dried fruit: mango, blueberries and regular ol' raisins.

You want to fill a very clean quart jar 1/4 of the way with dried fruit and top it off with bottled water (you want it to be purified). Top each jar with a coffee filter and secure with a rubber band. It will take a few weeks to see anything happening. This is where you are trying to capture some wild yeast.

Every single day, you want to stir your fruit. After about 2 weeks, it will start to turn into alcohol and you'll be able to smell it.

It will be foamy when you stir it. If you forget to stir, it can get a bit of mold on it. Just remove that with a spoon and carry one as normal.

Here are the raisin photos. It's the same process with any dried fruit.

The raisin one took a few more days to ferment than the mango one did. I still haven't gotten the blueberries to go. I'm going to just let them hang out and see what happens to them.

Yesterday, I strained the fruit out and discarded it. It did its job wonderfully. When I tasted the liquid, it tasted like vinegar. I put it into a clean jar and capped it. Vinegar ages well, just as wine does.

Finished mango vinegar. I'll use this in some Caribbean-inspired BBQ sauce.

Next, I strained out the raisins. I tasted this vinegar. This was surprisingly delicious. I'll be using this in place of rice wine vinegar in Asian recipes.

I have 2 new vinegars to experiment with now. Next on my list is some papaya and some currant vinegar. What will I do with those? I do not know, but the sky is the limit!