Quick Facts About Vinegar

• About 5,000 BC, the Babylonians used vinegar as a preservative and as a condiment where they also flavor it with herbs and spices. Hippocrates used vinegar medicinally to heal wounds. Hannibal of Carthage, the great military leader and strategist, used vinegar to dissolve boulders that blocked his army’s path.
• Roman legionnaires used it as a beverage. Julius Caesar’s army used apple cider vinegar to keep to ward off diseases. Cleopatra dissolved precious pearls in vinegar to offer it as her love potion to Anthony and according to the Vinegar Institute, she demonstrated vinegar’s solvent property by dissolving precious pearls in it to win a wager that she could consume a fortune in a single meal.
• Sung Tse, the 10th century creator of forensic medicine, advocated hand washing with sulfur and vinegar to avoid infection during autopsies.
• To prevent scurvy (a disease resulting from a deficiency in vitamin C), Christopher Colombus and his crew brought along barrels of vinegar on board. During the American Civil War, vinegar was used to treat this condition.
• Vinegar comes from the French word ‘vin aigre’ which means sour wine.
• Vinegar can be made from foods that contain sugar and starch, such as apples, grapes, peaches, berries, melons, dates, sorghum, coconuts, rice, honey, molasses, milk or wine.
• Two basic fermenting processess are involved in the making of vinegar. The first process uses yeast to convert natural sugars to alcohol. The second process utilizes acetobacter aceti bacteria to convert the alcohol to acetic acid. The culture of acetobacter aceti bacteria grows on the surface of the alcohol liquid and fermentation is left to proceed slowly over the course of weeks or months. A long fermentation period allows the accumulation of a non-toxic slime composed of yeast and acetobacter aceti bacteria, known as the mother of vinegar. Fermentation must be done under the right conditions.
• To quicken the production of vinegar, the alcohol is oxygenated by agitation and the bacteria culture is submerged to hasten fermentation.
• Besides acetic acid, vinegar also contains other constituents such as vitamins, mineral salts, amino acids, polyphenolic compounds (e.g. galic acid, catechin, caffeic acid, ferulic acid), and non-volatile organic acids (e.g. tartaric, citric, malic, lactic).
• Acetic acid is also referred to as artificial vinegar and it is not a true vinegar because it lacks the vitamins, minerals and other compounds found in non-distilled natural vinegar. Acetic acid is produced though chemical means, not through fermentation.
• The distillation of vinegar causes the vinegar to lose many of its natural nutrients. According to Lawrence J. Diggs, author of “Vinegar: The User Friendly Standard Text Reference and Guide to Appreciating, Making, and Enjoying Vinegar”, when the natural vinegar is distilled, it is very difficult to tell the difference between it and the artificial vinegar.

  Subscribe to my RSS feed for regular updates.