week eight: the “MUH-zare” of all vinegars

February 24, 2009

on day 9 of intro to professional cookery, Chef Pierre took out a small glass jar from the steel cabinets behind the demonstration table and placed it on the cutting board. it resembled a jar of smuckers jam, though the contents were a plum-colored liquid with something opaque floating inside. Chef had scribbled “Vinegar Mother Age 20 years Save & Respect” on the outside. “i made this vinegar,” he said, proudly as he passed around the tiny jar for each of us to smell. it smelled of strong, clean and pure concentrated cider vinegar.

the word “vinegar” derives from the old french word vin aigre, which means “sour wine.” this succint description is fitting: vinegar is essentially the fermentation of natural sugars to alcohol and then the secondary fermentation from alcohol to vinegar. vinegar has been used for centuries, since the discovery by chance that a cask of wine gone past its time had turned into something different. with time vinegar’s potential was discovered as a preservative, a healer and especially as a flavoring agent. vinegar can be made from almost any liquid that contains ethanol including wine, cider, beer and fermented fruit juice. today we have vinegars ranging from malt (made by malting barley) to apple cider, to balsamic (made from concentrated, aged grape juice) and rice.

but Chef’s vinegar was different from most commercial vinegars we see today. he reached into the jar with a teaspoon and pulled out a thin, burgundy-colored opaque sheet that was almost perfectly round and the same diameter as the jar. “this is the MUH-zare,” he said, spreading the limp, shiny disk out on the cutting board. i copied his words into my little notebook, still slightly confused as he went on to discuss that the muh-zare was a substance that developed several weeks after he mixed together cider vinegar and leftover wine. i looked again at the writing on the jar and realized that the purplish disk was in fact a mother.

a mother of vinegar is a substance made up of yeast, acid bacteria and a form of the organic compound cellulose that develops on alcoholic liquids that ferment slowly over the course of weeks or months. the yeast creates alcohol, which is then transformed by the acetic acid bacteria, turning the alcohol into acetic acid with the help of time oxygen from the air. acetic acid is what gives vinegar its distinctive flavor and what differentiates it from wine. a mother can be split between two people without harming it, since it will grow as long as it has sufficient oxygen and sugar and is kept at the right temperature, between 60 and 85 degrees F. added to wine, cider or other alcoholic liquids, the mother will produce vinegar. a mother can also form in store-bought vinegar if there is non-fermented sugar or alcohol in that vinegar.

at the demonstration table, Chef broke off a small piece of the mother to pass around. it had the cold, smooth texture of kelp. “does it move or do anything?” my classmate joe asked. i must admit it was unnerving to touch this living thing that had grown all by itself in that jar of fermented alcohol–i half expected it to start inching along my palm like a worm.

Chef’s 20-year-old mother, as we learned a few weeks later, had spent its life at his former restaurant in arlington heights, ill., le ti ti de paris, stretching the vinegar supply for use in vinaigrettes, beurre blanc and “a lee-tle in our steak tar tar, which gives it a real good taste,” he said. my classmate david added that when he was growing up, his mother would make her own vinegar from scratch, putting water, raw sugar and a slice of pineapple with the skin attached in a jar she kept under the sink. he said a mother would form inside as the sweetened juice fermented over several weeks.

Chef suggested we make our own mother of vinegar as a class using cider vinegar and wine, and another using david’s family method (because breaking a piece off the existing mother would be much too easy).

he took out two fresh jars and appropriately labeled them “mother to be,” along with the date of “birth” of our vinegars. he filled the first about halfway with apple cider vinegar. “i used to make the mother with vinegar and apple cider, when cider wasn’t pasteurized,” he lamented as he poured.

then he filled the rest of the jar with inexpensive white wine, saying a higher sugar content in the wine is better, meaning that making a mother doesn’t require a high-quality wine. “use white wine because you want to see the mother develop,” he added.

Chef dropped a slice of pineapple he had found in one of the kitchens into the other small jar, along with a few heaping spoonfuls of raw sugar. he then filled it nearly to the top with water and loosely fitted the lid on top.

“we don’t want to choke the mother–it needs oxygen,” he said, leaving each jar open just slightly. “and the mother should be in a dark place.”

as our vinegars sit in their tiny jars in their dark cabinets at just the right temperature with just enough air and food, i promise to keep you posted as weeks pass and (hopefully) our class mothers-to-be develop.