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A basic wild ferment fruit vinegar recipe

This is a wild fermentation recipe, which means that it uses all the yeasts and microflora already present in your environment and your fruit to kick-start fermentation. Use this recipe to ferment any fruit or combination of fruits to make vinegars and shrubs to your taste. The possibilities are endless! But thankfully the process is all the same. And you may never purchase either a shrub syrup or a vinegar from a store again.
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Ingredients
  

  • ½ kilogram or a little over a pound of fruit and washed peels.
  • ½ cup sugar plus 2 tablespoons
  • Water

Instructions
 

Choose the fruit

  • Know your ingredients and choose the fruit wisely: pineapple, jamun, mangosteen, lychee, cashew apple, pomelo, mango, kelakkai or caronda all work very well.
  • Combinations can work well, too: mangosteen and a little lychee, for example (but too much lychee seems to encourage slime, so keep he mangosteen-to-lychee ration high in favor of mangosteen). But, depending on the tannin content of the fruit and peels (jamun, mangosteen), or their bitterness (pomelo), you might wind up with a vinegar that has the mouthfeel of a red wine or is much more like white.
  • Use the peels as well as the fruit, though you can adjust ratios in favor of fruit for taste reasons. Mangosteen “husk” brings a good deal of astringency, but pineapple peel of course is fine in any quantity.

Prepare the ferment

  • Once you’ve chosen your fruit—add them to a glass jar large enough to accommodate the mixture and with plenty of headspace to spare, along with the sugar. Add water barely enough to cover the fruit and mix well.
  • Cover the mouth of the jar with cheesecloth or a thin Kerala towel piece doubled-up and secure with a rubber band or other tie.
  • Stir the mixture once a day for a week-to-10-days. You should see the natural, “wild” yeasts on the skins of the fruit starting to bubble and ferment the sugars into ethanol, releasing some carbon dioxide.
  • If you do NOT see enough signs of fermentation, you could add a little whey (the almost clear liquid that gathers and pools in yogurt containers) and see if that helps. Make sure your yogurt culture is raw and relatively fresh though.
  • If the bubbling is unnaturally vigorous, or you see other signs of things going wrong: mouldy growth, anything but acrid smells, liquid becoming slimy, then it’s best to discard and start over.
  • If all seems well, taste the liquid—it should be souring and maybe also a little sweet from the sugar added to fuel the fermentation. You can add another tablespoon or two of sugar about a week in, just to ensure that fuelling is sufficient.
  • After about 10 days, strain out and discard the solids, and add the liquid back to the jar to ferment into vinegar. This time, cap the jar but lightly.
  • Check the vinegar periodically, after every 2 weeks or so. It may take a while to convert fully—3-4 months—all the more since this is a wild fermentation and with no starter used. Taste the vinegar for acidity. If it feels like it is intensifying, then all is well. If it seems like it’s turning bitter and you see any signs of mouldy growth on the surface, then it’s best to discard and start over.
  • You should see some thickening somewhere in the jar—bottom, sides, surface. That’s the mother. Strain her out and bottle the vinegar, reserving the mother for use as starter in the next vinegar batch.
  • If there isn’t much of a mother (as there hasn’t really been with my cashew apple vinegars), then leave your brew as is.
  • You can use the vinegar at any point from now on, or age it for a year or more to mellow the flavors.
  • Begin a new batch with your mother added in to speed the process, or give some of it away as a starter.